Excel 12 String Keyless Add E to F Knee Lever - Do It USelf!

Greg Cutshaw · From: Corry, PA, USA

Here's some photos of a do it your self add a a knee lever to an Excel 12 string keyless guitar. There's not a lot of room on the underside and adding a knee lever to a guitar while conceptually trivial can be an adventure. This particular knee lever accomplishes some real nice sounds by raising only the lower E string to F on the C6 tuning. A short tutorial of this change along with some tabs, sound files and copedant analysis is shown here:

http://www.gregcutshaw.com/Tab/Tab14.html

You can click on the pics below to show them full size. I bought the knee lever parts directly from Mitsuo at Excel, payed with PayPal and he made and delivered the parts in three weeks. What I bought was new front legs and pedal rods to add 1 1/8" of height to the guitar along with 2 knee lever kits. Mitsuo provided a generous supply of cross shafts, bushings, bell cranks (rod pullers), nylon tuners, pull rods, 3 knee levers (one with an offset profile) and other stuff as shown here (near the bottom):

http://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=312577

The knee cross shafts are accessed by removing a chromed back panel. This gives easy access to all the cross shafts. The photos show a close up of the factory install of a similar knee lever, the E9th E to F's LKL. Various challenges arose:

1) The factory cross shaft was too long. I used a cut-off wheel (Dremel) to shorten it and then a grind wheel to chamfer the edges and smooth them.

2) The provided Delrin bushing was too long and extended beyond the back plate holes so it had to be ground shorter.

3) The backplate has larger holes near on the bottom row that are used to control the knee lever travel. The shaft location that I selected was not pre-drilled for a knee lever. I used a 15/16" drill to drill the hole larger. The factory hole size is 12mm but you can adjust the knee lever travel by varying the hole size.The knee levers do have a wide range of tilt adjustment. I later replaced the one shown in the pics with an offset knee lever bar to give me more access to the vertical knee lever.

4) The E to Eb knee lever has the rod pullers mounted upside down to access the bottom row of the changer lower levers. This changer design negates the need for reversing the lever direction and also reduces the pull rod clutter as more pull rod levels are provided. The problem here though is that there is no room or clearance to mount the E to F change rod puller without hitting the LKL rod pullers. No problem, just mount the rod puller backwards and grind a bit of it off to buy more clearance.

PICTURES:

(before mod)

(before mod showing upside down rod puller)

(Finished job - bottom view)

(Finished job - bottom view 2)

(Finished - Front View)

(Finished - Front View 2)

(Finished - back cover removed)

(Ready to drill top hole)

(Shaping end of cut cross shaft)

(Shortening the cross shaft)

(Shaft too long!)

(Selected shaft location - upper hole too small)