Hacking the Gibson, Part 5

Four coats of Formby's Tung Oil Finish on so far and its looking great. This is some very nice looking wood. Sanding took a little while to get it flat but it went very quickly after that.

One more picture from above. Can't wait to get it all done.

I'm trying to get all the woodworking stuff done before I move on to the metal parts (which I'm not looking forward to). While the finish is drying, I decided to start working on the fretboard. Its a 22.5" scale length which doesn't match any standard scale length and any guitar part store would sell. My plan was to buy a blank rosewood fretboard and cut fret slots and fill them with strips of maple. Stewart MacDonald sells all the parts I used for this. As a guide for where to make the fret lines, I used the existing cheap aluminum fretboard that came on the pedal steel. I cut it down a little and taped it to the bottom of the rosewood so that I can still see the lines sticking out the side. The mitre box makes it go very quickly. I cut 12 slots today and I can probably do the rest in about 10 minutes, then I can start gluing in the wood strips. Maybe tomorrow?

Sanding is tedious

No pictures today, but I just wanted to mention that sanding is tedious. The finish came off pretty quickly, or so I thought. It looks like there was some stain or some transparent coat underneath, so its taking me a while to actually get down to bare maple. Until then, there is kind of an inconsistent yellowy coating in spots that I'm trying to remove. The good news: the parts I ordered come in tomorrow, so I should have a lot to work on over Christmas break.

I wonder how long it will take before someone reads this or it shows up in a search engine? Stype.org gets about 35 hits a day from random people, mostly there because of my gallery of photos from when I attended the world's strongest man pre-season trial. I think that site will be going away over the next few days, and I'll just let that content turn into 404s. Its time to clean up some of my old web presence and create some new. Maybe I can force a redirect from all stype.org urls to this blog? Maybe.

Hacking the Gibson, Part 3

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have flame maple. I took the finish off yesterday using paint stripper and did the initial sanding to smooth it out and see what this wood was about. Well, I would definitely say that whoever built this pedal steel never intended it to have an opaque finish. The front side is a beautiful piece of flame maple, the same kind of wood you would see on the top of a Les Paul. It looks amazing and I haven't even finished sanding it yet. Thats all for today but I'm hoping to have it fully sanded by the end of the week.

Hacking the Gibson, Part 2

So I officially started working on the Gibson Electraharp. You can see above how its basically 2 parts: a metal chassis and a wooden box. Everything is mounted straight onto the chassis because it is rigid. Between the strings and the springs, there is a lot of tension on this part. It weighs a ton.

So I started taking the finish off. It was originally like a dark orange color and a previous owner painted it black. I'm kind of partial to natural finishes even if this isn't the prettiest wood, so my plan is to remove all the finish on it currently and do something new.

I took the tuner assembly off and disassembled it for cleaning. Its in surprisingly good shape for its age. Tarnished and dirty but the gears move smoothly and it feels really sturdy. A little grease and it will be perfect. Definitely happy that this part is in such good shape as its a little hard to replace.

One last random picture:

Hacking the Gibson, Part 1

So I've been looking for a project to work on lately. And I've been looking to get an 8-string steel guitar to learn. Maybe even a pedal steel. I found something on Craigslist last week that satisfies these needs. I didn't really know what it was, other than the fact that it had 8 strings and 4 pedals. So I bought it for $50 and decided to figure it all out later. Here is what I got:

I have it now and I still barely know anything about it. Its a Gibson Electra-harp, probably from the 1950s. Its my understanding that Gibson started making pedal steels around 1939 up until WWII. After the war they started making them again but in a different style due to patent problems with Kalima (the other maker of pedal steels at the time). So this is a post-war Gibson. Eight strings, four pedals. A single-coil pickup. This doesn't really have a model number. Its kind of a hodge-podge of parts and materials.

This is the changer mechanism in the condition I received it. Not so great. Missing a lot of bolts and it doesn't really work. The posts that the string go on are busted. I'll post more on this thing in the future and I hope to figure out how it works and maybe even make it work again some day.

These are the tuners and they look in excellent shape. Its a cast brass base with 4 pairs of tuners attached to it. You can see the pickup in this picture too. Its missing the cover that would have been over it originally. You can also see that the bridge at this end (and the other end too) is missing. I'll need to fabricate something there because I doubt I'll ever find an original one without buying an entire second guitar.

So my plan is to restore this thing. I'm not really concerned with trying to do a real vintage restoration. I'm sort of trying to make it work again but not afraid to modernize it either. Gibson pedal steels are cool but not really popular or worth a ton. I want to make this thing useful, and that may result in turning it into a lap steel and disabling the pedal mechanism. My plan is to rebuild it as a working lap steel but to leave the whole changer mechanism attached so I can start rebuilding that after. If that doesn't happen, I'll at least have a pretty good quality lap steel. Expect more soon! I've already disassembled the whole thing and started taking the finish off...I'll have pictures soon.