All right, let’s wrap this up.
Details are important. Ground the bridge. It only takes a little effort but the strings won’t pop every time you touch them and it may keep you from getting shocked. You don’t want to be the ground circuit. I soldered a length of wire to the pickup plate which also has the shielding wire soldered to it. Then the wire gets tucked between the bridge and the area of the body previously painted with conductive paint. The 8.15 Ohms written on the plate is the resistance of the pickup in 1000s of Ohms. It’s an indicator of how “hot” (output level) it is. This is pretty typical for a Tele bridge.
Next I soldered the output jack to the pickup wiring; it goes ground to the sleeve and positive to the tip. Use good parts, the jack is Switchcraft. Then two screws hold the mounting plate to the body.
Ok, I cheated. I ordered a vinyl decal for the fretboard. I know, I know. But this whole project is just to see if I could build a lap steel and learn to play it. So I trimmed the width to 2.5”, centered it up and applied it to the body.
Not knowing how the vinyl “fretboard” would hold up I cut a piece of plexiglass and attached it over the decal with 6 small screws.
I thought I had a set of 12 or 13 gauge strings but ended up using a set of D’Addario 11’s to string it up. Once they were on, I set the action height at the bridge to match the nut so they are parallel to the body and made sure the top of the strings were all at the same height to get good contact across them with the slide.
Setting the intonation is as basic as postioning the saddles 22.5” from the back of the nut as that is the scale length. Theoretically, you don’t have to do much more than that since it’s a slide guitar and the correct pitch is all about where you position the slide; but after stretching the strings and tuning it to open D, I went ahead and did some fine tuning to get the intonation dialed in as close as I could. This is done by adjusting the saddles back and forth effectively lengthening or shortening the string length to counteract sharpe or flat.
So that’s it. The little lap steel came out pretty nice. I tried to make some noise but tuned to open D the strings feel slinky. I’ll try a couple different tunings and see if I can learn a song. If I still lived in TN I’d take to down to
@Ruffinogold and let him show me the ropes.
