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Topic: First Home-Made Lap Steel |
Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 14 Jan 2007 11:21 am |
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I thought it might be interesting to bring out photos of our first efforts at making our own. I can distinctly remember back in my teenaged days wondering why anyone would waste good money buying a plank with strings stretched across it when you could build one in an afternoon out of parts found in the garden shed. Nowadays I appreciate the artwork and different tone characteristics of old instruments. In those days I had no money and just wanted to play.
Here I am in 1963. Notice the RAF-surpus headphones. The guitar used an old pickup from a suplus store, which moved position on model railway track pinned sideways. Machine heads were from an old guitar. Wood was found in my Granddad's garden shed. It also incorporated a neck stand from Meccano parts. Because it had a separate neck and no bracing the neck had warped upwards, not that that mattered as I was using a tone bar cut by my Dad from stainless steel bar stock. I painted it black and on the front put my initials "AFB" and the words "SOLID STEEL", which would always evoke the comment, "...but it's made out of wood !"
But it worked and didn't sound too bad. I tuned it to an open E chord. Over the ensuing years I built many lap steels, but I didn't actually buy a "store-bought" instrument until about four years ago.
About 1972 I built a pedal steel, with the mechanism entirely from wood, plus hinges from a hardware store. It never stayed in tune, so I removed the pedals. As I couldn't afford a pedal steel I didn't take that up until about 2004.
Last edited by Alan Brookes on 20 Jan 2007 10:14 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Larry W. Jones
From:
Longmont, Colorado
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Gary Lynch
From:
Creston, California, USA
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Posted 14 Jan 2007 5:28 pm
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| Nice vintage photo. How about that TV set! |
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Randy Reeves
From:
LaCrosse, Wisconsin, USA
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Posted 15 Jan 2007 5:13 am
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you maybe built my parents TV? sure looks similar.
cant wait for th resized photo. pixels look nice this morning,tho. |
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Alan Brookes
From:
Brummy living in Southern California
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Posted 19 Jan 2007 4:44 pm
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| I didn't have an amplifier back then, and we used to record in mono, so I was the only one able to hear what I was playing (via the headphones) until the playback. And, of course, with only one track you couldn't remove it. I got plenty of evocative feedback from the others at the session at times ! They took to calling it the "Electric Barbed Wire Fence". |
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James Quackenbush
From:
Pomona, New York, USA
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Posted 19 Jan 2007 6:10 pm
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Alan,
You da man !!.....Great picture !!...It brings back some great memories !!...Sincerely, Jim |
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