6 String Electric Solid Body Lap Steel Guitar

[Steve Woods]

This is the closest thing to a guitar that I have ever built so far... mahogany, cherry, walnut and jarrah with polished brass bridge/tailpiece by Ryan Rukavina, bone nut, and Kluxon Deluxe tuners off my '64 SG Special which has had Schallers on it for years now. The Golden Age Parson Street P 90 type pickup from Stewart MacDonald sounds fantastic. I used their LP Junior wiring kit with the CTS pots.







I am real happy with the way it turned out except for one small thing. The tone control pot doesn't do anything. The volume works fine. I'm no electonics type guy but I did follow the schematic that came with the kit exactly and have double and triple checked my solder connections. Did I just happen to receive a faulty potentiometer or did I manage to screw up the world's simplest circuit?

[Hans Bezemer]

Steve,

That's a nice little guitar. Good work.
Do you have a multi-meter? Then you can check if the pot is working or not.
You can post a picture of your guitar electronics, then it would be easier to see if something is wrong.

[Mark Swanson]

The tone pot requires a path to ground, so if you haven't grounded it that might be the problem.

[Steve Woods]

I have wired it just like this:



Should I add an additional ground wire from the tone pot to...?

[Mark Swanson]

Yes, that schematic doesn't show the tone pot as grounded. Go ahead and run a wire from the back of the volume pot to the back of the tone pot.

[Steve Woods]

Thank You Mark! That did the trick alright. I'm surprised the schematic did not show that. Thank also Hans. I really do appreciate the help.

[David King]

You can send StewMac a note, it's the sort of missing detail most wouldn't notice. I'm glad you got it working. It looks like a lot of fun to play.

[Steve Woods]

When it comes to tone for dobro or lap steel I think the vintage bakelite bars can not be beat, however they are getting very hard to come by and increasingly expensive when they are offered for sale. When they get dropped on concrete or tile the bakelite cracks, a real heart breaker when it happens to one you've searched years for and paid good money for when the holy grail finally did surface and then you drop it on a hard surface!

So I had this idea that corian might be a suitable substitute for bakelite...





My lead filled corian (L) duplicates the size, shape and weight of the green bakelite (C) The rare black rajah (R) is what I had hoped to try duplicating next BUT:

The corian, sadly, lacks the tone of the original bakelite. Any chemists out there who can explain the difference in tonality of these two plastics?

[Steve Senseney]

I looked at the wikipedia article. The chemistry is not something you want to make at home.

It looks like there are products being sold on EBay and perhaps other places. These might be milled down to your requirements.

Edit:

Another source oldbakeliterod.com

[Edgar Jessop]

http://www.mcmaster.com/

Search for 3607

[Steve Woods]

I have refined a few things with my corian lead filled slide bars and am much happier with the results. I got brave and went one drill bit size larger for a thinner corian shell, buffed it out to a slicker surface and came up with a tighter bond between corian and lead. What an improvement! I am happy with these "tone bars" now.



I'm not sure what "garolite" is but I did order a piece from McMaster Carr just to check it out. It sounds like some sort of fibrous material that would not be homogenious enough to machine smoothly? The description makes it sound more suitable for automotive brake shoes?

[Matt Madden]

Not to frighten anybody too much, but I would be careful machining Garolite. Most Bakelite contained asbestos, and it wouldn't surprise me too much if Garolite has some, too. It might not, but asbestos is not banned in products like these. Non-asbestos fibers are no friend to your lungs, either, so take reasonable care.

[Steve Senseney]

Garolite seems to be epoxy bonded fiberglass. No apparent asbestos.

http://www.spambutcher.com/parts/garolite.html

The Bakelite evidently often does contain asbestos.

Here is a study of machining Bakelite, and the amount of fibers released.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16147471

I personally would not worry about being around Bakelite. In the solid form, the fibers are not released. If milled, it releases some. I would find another material rather than Bakelite personally.

[Steve Woods]

Here is a piece of the garolite I received from McMaster Carr. It is, obviously, layered with fine fiberglass mesh but it did machine and polish up nicely and has a very nice tone on the strings. In person the color and visual texture have the appearance of a fine old burl pipe, but my camara gives it more of a corncob pipe appearance.

[Art Davila]

I like the look of that corncob design. I would not mind a set of tone pot hats made from that material.

[Steve Woods]

Art, what a great idea! How many do you want? This stuff looks particularly good against mahogany. Wish I had a better camara. The true color is somewhere in between these two shots with different lighting. The lap steel I am currently building will definetly be sporting a pair of these...





Incidentally, I was wrong about fiberglass. Reading the McMaster Carr catalog again it turns out to be a cotton fabric. I'm liking this stuff better all the time fot it's looks and machining characteristics.

[Hans Bezemer]

Wow, that turned out nice.
I like them.

[Art Davila]

wow very nice. Looks like it might look nice against maple too. I will send a pm

[Jason Rodgers]

Those look really cool. If the epoxy/resin materials are giving you the tone you want, you could try out the various impregnated and dyed woods available for pen making.

[Randy Cordle]

I use Garolite a bunch for many instument building purposes. I recently did some arm rests using it and it's a dead ringer for super-nice ebony if you just specify the opaque black variety. The binding material does not show when polished.