Steel Guitar Builder

Yayyy, finally got my new mill in and working. Initial glitch: it came with a drawbar for the M10 thread and my collet chuck needs M8. Couldn't get a replacement chuck with M10, couldn't buy an M8 drawbar, so I decided to make an M8 drawbar on my little lathe. It took some time and care but it's in and I'm cutting metal. Next stop, I'm going to make a new countershaft, bellcrank, stops and all, so I can fit an LKV. It seems like it would be useful, and it will enhance the steel.

Time for a beer to celebrate.

Bluesteel, you are teasing us with all these fancy descriptions and not one picture? Get that Kodak going my man..I can't wait to see your mill

OK Bent, finally got some batteries into my old Nikon digicam, here's a couple of shots. The lathe is a little Chinese thing, works well if you respect its limitations and I've made some parts on it already including the propane burner for my planned aluminum forge. The black box on the top is a turns counter for coil winding and such. It picks up the pulses from the optical chopper on the mandrel, which is intended for speed control. It gets 10 pulse per rev, so rather than use a divide-by-10 chip I put a decimal point on the display with a felt tip. Now *that's* bang for the buck!

The mill is a Champion 20V, again I think of Chinese origin. The table is big enough to take any job I can foresee doing. It sells in the States as a Grizzly 0704 or something like that I think. Here I am machining relief grooves for the strings on the machine head casting off one of those interesting Lone Star steels. My friend John Davis acquired it recently. This guitar has its tuning machines vertical up the left side of the guitar, and the changer is exposed on the right-hand end. It's to make the guitar shorter and lighter, so it can go in an aircraft overhead locker.

Sorry about the picture quality. These pics are as big as the site will permit me to upload.

This is my second "real" piece of work, the first was machining flats on the gas inlet end of the propane burner so I could tighten the gas unions with a spanner. I think I like my milling machine!

Also in the workshop is a belt sander, buffing machine, bench grinder, drill press and bandsaw. Oh, and an excellent BIG steel-framed bench. My first job was rewiring so I had some sensible strip-lighting in the ceiling and enough power sockets around the walls. I feel like I've actually moved from preparation to doing real stuff!

Bluesteel, that looks mighty good man! I like your keyhead. Looks like it is a one piece casting.Very interesting. I am saving my cutoffs and shavings for the day I might have time to learn a bit about the art.

Thank you, Bent - just to clarify, the keyhead is a one-piece casting taken off a Lone Star steel, it's very unusual in many design aspects. This one had to be modified, to provide those tapered clearance grooves for the strings because of the way the keyhead is mounted - vertical, down the left side of the steel.

It was a perfect "toe in the water" exercise for me to graduate from test pieces to working on somebody's REAL steel! I was very careful with the setup, as you can imagine. Today I milled and polished a blanking plate in 6mm Aluminum to cover where the old keyless changer had been. The new owner didn't like the keyless, and wanted to go back to the more conventional keyhead.

For myself, I'm really interested in building a keyless head soon, and am a long way down the road with design sketches for an all-pull changer. But first I want to build an adjustable double-size try-out jig in MDF or ply, so I can assess the effect of different pivot point positions and so on. Gotta get the design right first.

Build the tools, to build the steel.

Hooray, finally got my mill equipped with digital readout! Now I can place the tool with better accuracy - I found out early on how easy it was to mis-count the turns of the dial with mechanical scales.

Inches or metric, absolute or relative, the scales by iGaging.com in San Clemente, Calif. have remote display. They are the dog's proverbials and they are cheap. The steel scales are accurate to 1 thou, these are the alloy scales, accuracy 2 thou - good enough for me. I got them from MicroMark - free plug! A hundred bucks and I'm good to go.

I need to tidy up the wiring runs and install some shields for the scales, but that's a quick job. Sorry about the focus problem, my camera gets confused easily. I wish there was a way to attach bigger images but this site seems to limit us to 800 x 600.

Time to start proper work very soon.

Will