You only need fret markers for guidance, not fretting, so you can obviously pick out your own scale length, then use a fret calculator to work out the positions. After which you mark up the fretboard, cut some slots and either fill them with contrasting wood slivers or a white wood filler or epoxy. A lot of people haven't bothered to do that but bought a used cheap classical guitar and taken the fingerboard off that (complete with frets). That gives you around a 25" scale length plus a wider fingerboard than on a steel-string guitar, which is fairly common on a lap steel.
Lap steels also normally run with parallel strings, so you'll probably need to use a custom nut blank (not one for a classical or steel-strung guitar) to get the width required at the nut.
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