Bluestem Strings Beginners Guide To Lap Steel Construction INTRODUCTION Thinking of building your first lap steel? Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to think of gathering all the requisite information necessary to construct a basic instrument, especially if you have no prior experience with musical instrument construction.

In this, my first Instructable, I will attempt to chronicle the construction of a simple Lap Steel guitar. Disclaimer; power tools and sharp cutting tools will be used and I take no responsibility for people who use these things carelessly, read and understand manufacture's instructions and safety guidelines for their proper and safe use. The nice thing about a lap steel guitar is that the fret board can be super simple or non existent at all. You don't need to install fret wire and if it isn't perfectly flat or crowned it doesn't matter.

Here I am trying to decide if I should use walnut or some lovely bird's eye maple I had on hand. Since they both looked good I decided to use them both. You could assemble the fret board right on the guitar or do as I did and glue it up and mark it off before I attached it to the guitar. The end product should be 2 1/4' wide by 1/8' to 1/4' thick by about 18' long, it is better to go long and trim later. Also, a word about scale length, I will be using a 22 1/2' scale length with 25 fret positions. This link has a great fret calculator.

NBA 2K14 cover star LeBron James may be on the verge of becoming the most dominant athlete in videogame history, challenging the throne of “” (Michael Jordan in NBA Courtside) and Jon Dowd (Barry Bonds in ). Nba 2k14 lebron james hd face texture v11 pro. James’ rating in the newest edition of the annual franchise, set to release on current-gen consoles October 1st, is a nearly-perfect 99.

Now is the time to start thinking about how the electronics are going to work, in this step I show the process I went through to make the pick-up cover plate. I started by using a 1/8' X 2' X 4' piece of maple I had left from the fret board. It is important to have extra of what ever stock you are going to use because this step is deceptively difficult to pull off in one go. Lay out must be accurate and your cuts need to be clean. I'll let you get the exact dimensions from the link I posted in the intro. I used a variety of tools here, a drill press, a rotary tool with a steel burr attachment a copping saw and a variety of files and rasps. Cutting the cavity for the pick up is where things have the potential to go terribly wrong.

Once again be sure of your lay out and where on the guitar neck it will go. There are all kinds of theories about the perfect placement of a pick up that you don't need to get into. What you need to know is what space do you have available to work with? Since the scale length is 22 1/2' then we know the bridge will be exactly 22 1/2' from the nut. We also know where our fret board ends, since you have glued it on by now. So, pick a spot about half way between the bridge and the end of the fret board. Here I used a drill press and a 3/4' bit, use a bit that has a flat face, something like a forsner(sp?).

You will remove most of the material with this and work to the lay out lines with a hammer and chisel. I set my drill press to cut to a depth of 3/4' but you can go only 5/8' deep if you wish. In this step I'll show how I created the cavity for the volume pot and cord jack. As with all things, begin with locating where on the guitar you want to place the controls. Since this guitar will be played right hand, I placed the controls on the side facing away from the player. I started with physically placing the components on the blank and deciding how much space I need to provide for them.

After that it was only a matter of centering the space on the blank and drilling out the cavity. Like with the pick-up cavity I used a drill press to remove the material. I found there was no need to do any chisel work here because the components were round. Be sure you drill deep enough for the guitar cord to plug in without the end striking the bottom of the hole.