Custom Lap Steel Guitar

I had only experimented a bit with playing a guitar using a slide, but had never really had a guitar that was built for slide. I got the bug to try a lap steel guitar and my original plan was to buy a cheap lap steel and got a Roque RLS-1 for $150. It was terrible - poor construction, bad sound and cheap tuning gears.

--- I returned it ---

So I went to plan B - I could construct a better lap steel for the same price or less. I used two 3/4" maple boards, cut out the cavities for the pickups and controls, cut slots for the tuners in the top board and shaped them into what I thought my lap steel should look like. Part of my design was to make the neck board narrower than the body board underneath it. Another key feature was to stair-step the headstock so that the strings coming off the tuners would align perfectly with the slots in the nut. I glued the boards together and stained it a dark brown. I also embedded two 1/4-20' hex bolt inserts 8 inches apart into the bottom. The 1/4" size matches the threads on camera tripod mounts which allows me to mount it on a camera focusing rail and then on a tripod (or you can just play it sitting on your lap).

The pickups were a 10k bridge and a 6k neck, each 4-wire blade humbuckers I bought from Guitar Fetish. I wired it up with a single volume and tone control, using a push-pull switch to switch between single coil and humbucker. The bridge is a cheap hard tail Stratocaster-type bridge from eBay.

I also bought some uncut white pearloid pickguard sheets from Amazon and used them to create the pickguard, the fingerboard and an inlay between the tuning gears. I purchased a set of cardboard fretting templates from CB Gitty that showed the calibrations for various scale lengths. I used a 23 inch scale, drew the fret lines with a ruler and a Sharpie and used black pickguard screws as fret dots.

I like how the final project turned out. It plays well and looks great!