1950s Fender lap steel tuner assembly

[saturn]

I work for an old friend of mine at his small machine shop in the garage of the house he grew up in. It's pretty small, but we have several CNC mills, lathes and 2 Wire EDM. We do production work as much as possible, but since we are so small, and since he's been doing this so long, we get many people coming in who need some kind of custom made, one-off part. Most other shops can't or won't bother with that kind of stuff, so word-of-mouth gets around for people to bring it to our shop. Our friends come in a lot too or send their friends to see us for many projects.

 

Recently an old friend came in with a request for us to make the tuning assembly for an old 1950s Fender Lap Steel that he's trying to restore. Apparently he couldn't find one to buy anywhere else.

 

 

This one was obviously stamped out of a thin sheet and we have no such capability. Our only option is to mill it from a solid block of steel, and this is quite costly. It requires a lot of programming and numerous steps. Even have to make a special fixture just to hold the part in order to mill it from two sides. There were obviously no drawings, so we just had to measure everything with a Vernier and do our best to replicate. My friend is a mechanical engineer and a math wizard , so the custom programming was no real problem for him.

 

The guy was willing to pay the cost and we made it for him. It's obviously not as pretty as the original. We milled most of it in the CNC and hand ground some rough spots. To save time, we didn't bother doing the double cavity, and just left it solid from the back.

 

 

 

My job isn't too glamorous, but can occasionally be interesting and a unique place to work when we get some cool projects to do. B)

[deeman]

Very cool! Looks great