Steel Guitar Builder

Look at a cheap Spanish guitar and use the same bridge angle offsets between the 2-octave root notes of your tuning as are on string 1 and string 6 on the Spanish, about 3/32 inch. I would think the scale length would be measured at the center of the bridge, with bass being longer and treble being s...

Thanks for the info about your prototypes, Mac. I was about to embark on a two-piece finger on the left and a pull-release one-piece on the right. Now I will reconsider. Castle nuts is a good idea! In my design above an auxilliary spring could help pull the raise back to the stop and would also assi...

Bump re edits to previous post ...

Oops, forgot about the tuning aspect! Will think more about it.

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Get raise, lower, and tuning with this mod to your original idea, Mac.

If you have Winnie Winston's book "Pedal Steel Guitar" where he looks like a kid playing, go to page 112, bottom picture. In your diagram the bottom pin is replaced by 2 stops, one for raise and the other for lower. I will try to get a pic for you. ** OK, pic is below ... make bottom piece thicker s...

Mac: Regarding scraping for your original adjusting screw, how about drilling a small nylon ball half way through to fit the end of the screw. Drill a hole in the end of the screw and insert a tiny nylon rod. Kind of fiddly, but a small claw like what holds gems in rings could hold a ball-bearing. A...

Mac: You have 2 axels at the player's left. If you use those two-piece all-pull fingers that hinge in the middle, you save an axel. You're using two pieces of aluminum anyway. Now you have tuning nuts instead of screws, and you can raise OR lower. If you put them at each end you never need a reverse...

If you mount your steel on a console, you could improvise 2 foot pedals to pull the levers with a wire. Then your picking hand is not impeded. The levers would hang over the edge instead of being in-line. Hey, man, now you have an el-cheapo PSG. Now you can add a third lever to lower the root, witho...

Another idea, probably no good, but you know how some electrical light switches have a hole where you just push in the wire and it grabs. To release the wire you poke something in another hole. That could be developed into a screwless string retainer.