Does anyone remember ever having known – or known of – a pedal steel builder in the Chicago area named Johnny Cousineau? I doubt if his instruments ever became known, but I thought it might make an interesting story on the Forum – especially because of the unique design of his PSG.
I went out to his house in about 1955 when we were playing a two-week gig at the Chicago Theater. His shop was in his basement. He had a unique changer design, and I gave some thought to having him build me a steel. I’ll describe the design as best I can retrieve it from my old brain.
The steel stood on two legs that extended from the bottom of the steel to a floor board that had several little metal thingies (the pedals) protruding about an inch above the board. The two legs were relatively large aluminum tubes (probably about 2†in diameter). The set-up was simple in that when closed up the steel sat directly on the floor board. You would stick the tubes down through a hole in each end of the steel and twist lock them into the floorboard, then you simply pulled the steel up until the cylinders “clicked†into place at the top. When you slid the steel up the legs, the pull cables unfolded. The pedals were extremely easy to push down. When you pressed a pedal it activated a “cam†system consisting of a sliding aluminum piece that caused the changer mechanism to be pushed upward as the cam slid under an aluminum piece that somehow stretched the strings. I asked him if that wouldn’t result in a lot of wear on the two pieces that rubbed together. He showed me a test setup he was using to test the wear. It was a motorized rod similar to the “drivers†on a locomotive that convert rotary motion into reciprocal motion, and activated a copy of his cam system. He said he had already let the thing run long enough to simulate 20 years of pressing the pedal at a typical playing rate for 20 years, and found no wear on the cam arrangement. He said the aluminum oxide that formed on the surface of the aluminum acted like microscopic ball bearings. As I recall it, the tunings and pulls could not be changed, but he would build it with whatever tuning and pulls you specified.
I was just wondering if any of you had run across him or one of his steels – of any of those features were ever used on another make of PSG?
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