A found lap steel

Dan Lutz · From: Lexington, KY, USA

I have found a lap steel guitar which has suffered a lot of damage and I think someones poor attempt to repair it. It appears to be very similar to a Kalamazoo KEH. This is based on the look of the very distictive pickup plate and the bridge and the body shape. When looking at the pictures of these guitars on the web I noticed something that confuses me. It appears that the 12th fret is not spaced exactly between the nut and the bridge. How can this be? Am I just looking at the pictures wrong or is there really a difference in the placement of the frets on a steel guitar compared to an ordinary guitar?

To compound the problem the fretboard on the found guitar is completely messed up.

Any help you can give me with fret placement will be much appreciated. I realize the frets are for visual alligment only but I would like to do the best job I can.

Thanks, Dan

Brad Bechtel · From: San Francisco, CA

A search on "fret placement" (in quotes) at http://www.altavista.com turned up 48 results, including this one:
http://www.dougsparling.com/software/index.html
Free software for Windows that helps you calculate fret placement given a scale length.
I believe the Gibson/Kalamazoo steel probably has a 22.5" scale length, but a quick measurement from nut to bridge will confirm that.
As you guessed, there should be no difference in fret placement on a steel guitar vs. a regular guitar.

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Brad's Page of Steel:
www.well.com/~wellvis/steel.html
A web site devoted to acoustic & electric lap steel guitars

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