Red Pine Lap Steel - DIY

[Guvna19]

Guvna the design sketch looks great, sure it will work fine. Assume you will have a rear control cavity and jack on the side on the treble side of the bridge

Yep, , for the neck pup, assume i will need to drill a tunnel from the rear towards neck for wiring? and also read about needing an earth to the bridge from pots, that sound right?

[wokkaboy]

yeah Guvna you probably will get away with a long drill bit between neck and bridge pup cavities. You need to work out if the control cavity will have a plate ontop (top cavity) or rear cavity with a cover. All you need to do is drill a shallow angled hole under the bridge plate to the bridge pup cavity and run an earth wire to make contact with the bridge plate then run that to a common earth point, usually back of volume pot

[Simon Barden]

Yes, you need to decide where your controls are going to go. Do you stick with just a volume or do you want a tone knob as well? With two pickups you'll either need a selector switch or a blend knob (which involves using a stacked pot, which will be deeper than a standard pot).

I'm just wondering now about how thick your plank is. It's going to need to be a certain thickness to accommodate the pickups and controls. You'll probably need 38-40mm to get it thick enough for control cavities without paper thin tops (or bottoms) to them (depending on your control routing plans).

As shown, you'll need to rear rout for the pickup wiring. Easy enough to do and it's going to be hidden most of the time. Otherwise if you top rout, you'll need a pickguard of some sort.

I'd bring the headstock in a bit. I know you won't be using a trem on it, but even so, the straighter the stings run over the nut, the more solid the tuning will be. At the moment the strings will be fairly splayed out, rather like a Flying V headstock, but if you can arrange the headstock so that the tuning posts are in-line or almost in line with the nut slots, then there will be minimal sideways force on the strings, which can cause them to stick/grab in the nut and lead to tuning problems.

[Guvna19]

Thanks Simon, all good advice. specially re the headstock / tuning thoughts.

my plank was 47 mm before sanding off the paint so should still be plenty. at this stage the plan is to have volume/tone pots behind the bridge ( so top cavity with a plate similar to tele bridge plate) and a switch next to bridge on the treble side. the jack will be either same side as switch or possibly on the small flat part at the very rear, waiting to see how that might work out.
It may be possible to drill a core hole from the very rear through to the neck pup and run the wiring through without a cavity between the pups and maybe this core hole could then accomadate the jack, i dunno, im winging it as i go

[dave.king1]

You can get long auger bits of a suitable size from an unmentionable shed, care needs to be taken because they can run off course quite easily but they are the tool for the job

[Guvna19]

hi again,
received a few more parts in mail today (big thanks to Dedman)
tuners ,pots and 2 humbuckers,
previously got a tele bridge plus 2 pups from Dk too.

So, plan is to use tele bridge + pup (DK) an tuners/ pots from (Dedman).
could it be possible to use the humbucker (Dedman) as the neck pup? or stick wit tele? i reckon both could work, but is there any pros/cons and or experienced opinions?
just asking before the timber gets cut up. no real biggy either way as its first build and learnin as i go so all good experience.
interested in feedback re LapSteel
thanks Guvna

[Dedman]

some tele's run a single coil in the bridge and bucker in the neck, so no reason it wont work.

[Guvna19]

Taking shape today, needs lots of filing and sanding to correct my amateur work with the jigsaw

[Simon Barden]

Can I just mention that the shape is rather reminiscent of something. Was this intentional?

[wokkaboy]

Looks great Guvna. Should clean up nicely