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Topic: Otwin D8 renovation |
Paul Seager
From:
Augsburg, Germany
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Posted 28 Jun 2021 10:32 am |
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I'd like to share with you my first ever restauration project. It's an old German Otwin D8 lap steel (yes, it has no legs). The name Otwin goes back to 1886 but it was used as a brand by an East German company post war. The age of this is probably 50's which is when Hawaiian music was fashionable in this region. The first photo is as its current status and the other photos show what I started with!
  
To be honest it was an Ebay mistake. I had just got my first smart phone and tried Ebay and by a series of stupid clicks accidently bought it. Due to my shame and anger, it has languished in the cellar for about a decade. When the COVID lockdowns began I decided to give it a shot because, with all shops closed, I would not be able to spend another cent on it!
I put most effort into the wood work. Removing the paint took an age and every paint-removing technique you could name has probably been tried including an industrial sander! Big shout out for my good buddy Stefan Sonntag, probably Europes finest Archtop builder. Stefan spent many evenings answering my somewhat banal questions about woodwork and guitars and taught me how to use and maintain a scraper!
The worse thing about this beast was the screwed up cavity work. It was clumsily routed with an electric drill and a complete mess it was to! The original Otwins had sliding pickups mounted on rails and I can still see the screw holes for the rails but sadly the they were not part of what I bought. Stefan identified the wood as european Beech; not your usual guitar material but this was made in the DDR ! However I had a lot of Beech as firewood in my shed and I cut and sanded pieces to fit into the cavity until it was flush. I hand-chiseled a cavity for the original pickup, closer to the bridge as this is where my Rickenbacker's pups are and I wanted somehow to get that basic tone.
The binding is made from strips of pine that I had and were meant for picture framing. The curves in the binding are made from wood putty. The "scratch plate" is made from wood that originally was the back panel of a book shelf. I have no idea what it is! The finish is "teak burst". I had two types of teak oil, bought for garden furniture!
One is a stain and the other transparent. I just experimented with dark stain on the outside and transparent in the middle and smearing them in between. Sadly I forgot to photo the rear of the instrument which is where this technique worked surprisingly well! The wooden bridge was battered and bruised but I had some "mahogany" coloured wood stain and refinished the bridge with that. The fingerboards are original and made of plastic. They are badly warped and held on (just) with double sided tape. The "nut" is part of a shelving bracket. I took a nut off another lap steel and used it as a template. Works well enough. The tuners are not original and only 15 of the 16 worked. I had an old tuner that I've used and so far so good.
So how does it play? Not really well. String spacing is a little too tight for my liking; Both necks are on the same level so its actually not very comfortable to play the outer neck; The pickup is one block and has no switch so muting is a problem. Normally I have A6 on the inside and E Maj13 outside. I've switched those around so that A6, my main tuning is outside and I can mute the other strings. The pickup isn't bad, low on output but not too wimpy in tone. It is nothing like my Ricky's horseshoes but it's all I have right now.
What next? I may throw it on the fire. I may saw it down the middle and try raising the outer neck up 1cm! I may use it as a template and try and build something else from scratch. I have no plan yet as what to do with it! But it was fun and I learnt a lot which was all positive in an otherwise fairly negative year!
\paul
P.S.: If any of you are in the market for a superb jazz archtop and wish to join the company of Bruce Forman, Scott Henderson and Robben Ford, take a look at Stefan's website: http://www.sonntag-guitars.com/english/
I'm still trying to talk him into building an 8 string square neck Augusta but strangely, he's not convinced there's a market for it! |
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Glenn Wilde
From:
California, USA
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Posted 28 Jun 2021 4:08 pm
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Looks cool! How bout two more strings in the middle for one giant neck?  |
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Paul Seager
From:
Augsburg, Germany
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Posted 28 Jun 2021 8:43 pm
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| Nice idea Glenn. I will add that to my list of possible futures. Then I can start a new thread on how the heck to tune it and a third thread on how to stop it falling off my lap with so much weight at one end! |
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Nic Neufeld
From:
Kansas City, Missouri
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Posted 29 Jun 2021 8:04 am
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Wow! I wonder if there are more out there like it. I keep thinking of getting some kind of D8 to convert into an electric "veena"...one neck to be the playing strings, one neck to be sympathetic strings, with two pickups and a blend control. This design is perhaps ideal in that it is a solid body, so the resonance of the "playing" neck should actuate the sympathetic strings more than designs where the necks are separate...and it sounds like you are saying it has that issue (which is a problem for conventional playing...not for my application): "The pickup is one block and has no switch so muting is a problem."
That headstock though, that's enormous! Couldn't they have designed that a tiny bit more efficiently? 
_________________
Waikīkī, at night when the shadows are falling
I hear the rolling surf calling
Calling and calling to me |
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