The Steel Guitar Forum

I have a Magnatone lap steel and it is very old. I need to get a new fret board for it. Can anyone tell me where I can get one? It measures
22 3/8" from nock to bridge. The fret board is paper and glued unto the guitar. It is old and faded, written on, and scraped up to a point where you can barley make out the frets. HELP
Owen

most student model magnatones are worth around $100. I don't know where to get a fingerboard for it, but maybe it's not worth the bother.

Most short scale lap steel guitars have a 22-1/2 inch scale length. There are 22-1/2 inch fret boards available or with "Fret Calc" a 22-3/8 inch fret board could be made. The cost shouldn't be that much.

Roger

Owen,

I have yet to find an old Magnatone that I didn't like. Paying a bargain price for an old Steel doesn't mean beans about it's value; The ear, feel, mojo and other factors will establish it's "value" to the player, and to the public in many cases. One of my favorite Steels to play and hear is an old Aloha I paid $85 for; And I wouldn't take a cent less than $400 for because it means that much TO ME. Little Student and Leilani MOTS Magnatones play and sound great and got some good mojo.

Making a fretboard is not difficult at all, especially when there's enough of the old one to get the fretboard template from. Tape down tracing paper over the old board nice and flat and tight with masking tape. With a SHARP pencil, carefully and exactly mark the outline of the fretboard and the CENTER of each fret-line. The tracing can then serve as a template to place under a translucent piece of "plexiglas" to make a new fretboard; OR, with carbon paper, trace the template onto any number of other materials. Then painting a simple fretboard can be done by applying a black coat upon which the frets and borders are masked off with pin-striping tape and painted over with a light-color coat to match the steel. Remove the pin-stripe masking and you've got black frets and borders ready for a clear coat.

An easy way to make a fretboard is to draw it on paper with a NEW small fine-point permanant marker, then sealed with several mist coats of permanant Art fixatif, and laid under a matching clear "plexiglas" top piece. Or with a little more work a person can apply the fretboard design to the face-down side of a clear piece of "plexiglas", line art applied first followed by color coat, ...leaving a nice design on the under-side of nice looking plexiglas.

You might also desire to paint a new fretboard directly on your Steel after removing the old paper fretboard, by using variations of the techniques said above.

An SGF search for "fretboard calculator" should bring up a number of discussions about fretboard geometry and making them.

Aloha,
Denny T~
<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Denny Turner on 03 January 2005 at 02:07 AM.]</p></FONT>

The "magic ratio" is 0.94387 for frets.
Just take the exact scale length of the string and multiply it by 0.94387 to get the length from the bridge to the first fret mark. Then take that first fret length length and multiply by 0.94387 again to get the second fret. Repeat as many times as you like.


For further reading:
Here's one solution that shows a general way of generating the fret ratio.
This number comes from 10^(-1*((log(2))/12)), where the symbol ^ means "raised to the power".
This will work for wind chimes, garden hose trombones, or anything else that goes up an octave when you cut the distance in half. If it behaves in some other way, just substitute the octave distance ratio for the 2 in the equation above. Or if you want 24 notes per octave, substitute 24 for 12 in the equation above.