Guitar Players: Show us yours!

[Ulu]

I have been playing with the lap steel on and off now for a couple days and I have discovered that the tuning heads were installed crooked at the factory.

Some newbie didn’t know how to get the drill jig seated correctly, and the machine heads (tuners) on one side run uphill a little bit, and the tuners on the other side run downhill a little bit, each as a set.

It was really annoying until I adjusted them around and played with the tuners.

At first, It didn’t really want to stay in tune or tune at all. Well this was a used instrument, but nobody had ever played with it enough to break in the strings.

However I did get it to tune very nicely with a little bit of work and I found out why Hawaiian guitars grew pedals and two necks. I got bored playing in the key of D real quick. I wanted to change keys but it’s not easy.

This guitar appears to be made from a solid mahogany board. If I could get a mahogany dowel or a plug cutter and make some, I could plug all the crooked holes in the head stock, re-drill them straight, sand and refinish things, and also repair the small chips their novice drill man left in the finish by not using proper backup blocks.

Or I could cut the head off of this cheap guitar and introduce much more metal into the equation. I already have a set of nicer tuning heads that would make this guitar much better, because it does have the cheapest variety of tuning heads available as far as I could see.

But I’m thinking it should have a big stainless steel turning head shaped like a pineapple.

I couldn’t think of any other stereotypical symbol of Hawaii to put on there, except a can of spam and that wouldn’t look good.

I considered taking all the guts off of this guitar and mounting it on different wood.

I’m not sure I have the patience for that much woodworking right now. I still have to get some sanding and grinding done on my car and shoot some paint so I can get the same back on its wheels.

Also I have the parts to fix the Gibson, which is currently all apart and I still have the bobcat guitar all apart trying to get the contamination off.

I was unfortunately mistaken about the score guitar as I thought it was solid maple. As it turns out it is solid mahogany with a maple top and bottom.

That’s how they made the model with the fully blackened edges to conceal the mahogany.

 

[Ulu]

Major refit of the lap steel machine heads:

These are the world’s worst machine heads, turning this lovely instrument into an untunable purgatory of binding gears.

Notice how the bearings for the worm gears are simply stamped and folded up, and hooked about the bearing surface.

Further aggravating the problem was that one of the heads was installed very crooked, causing it to look bad and bind even more.

For the final indignation, the factory didn’t even bother to put touch up paint on the two mis-located holes, which had also chipped the finish where you could see it inside the head.

I have some Wilkinson machine heads witch are evidently made by a British sword company sold to China . . . LOL.

These are pretty nice and they were only $30. It looks like they’re going to fit nice and tight because I was careful not to oversize the holes. In fact these have about 0.008” taper and I accounted for that even, requiring me to slightly press these into place to get them to fit.

The whole idea is that once this thing is tuned it will stay tuned . . . Like a Hawaiian Steel tuna.

And with decent tuning heads it will be easy to change keys. I’ve corrected one hole but you can see that the worst one is still very far out of whack.

I used a steel washer and a razor knife to carefully mark the holes that I had to modify. By using tuners that require larger 10 mm holes I was able to compensate for the fact that these 2 holes were drilled out of place.

I touched up all the raw edges and original sloppy finish chips. I used a back up board, and jammed it in place with paper, so that the finish would not be chipped away as I whittled these little holes out to size with a razor knife.

I didn’t just stuff a electric drill in there, but I used it only at the end to ream the holes nearly to size. Then I sanded them slightly to get the final size.

Rubbing out the touchup paint, plus the “inside” areas where the factory didn’t rub it out.

We are approaching final assembly as I allow some final paint filling to dry. There were old screw holes from the old machine heads. All I did was fill them in with successive drips of acrylic paint and then rub them out.

I spent some time this AM playing with this lap steel before I gritted my teeth and tore the strings off of it. I really enjoyed it and I am really looking forward to playing it.

Unfortunately when I went to the music store today they did not have the strings I wanted for it, so I’m going to fuss around with needle nose pliers and get those old strings back in place.

 

[Ulu]

It lives!