Oahu Diana (Valco) Lap Steel Restoration

The volume control is a little crackly, so I'm going to hit it with some MG Chemicals Control Cleaner.  This is pretty much the best cleaner for pots that I've found.  A lot of folks use Deoxit, but that is really not for pots - it's for contacts.

You might notice the price tag - I got this at Baynesville Electronics.

The cleaning got the pot going well.  I don't like replacing old pots it I can avoid it.

I also removed the broken pickup mounting screw.  Piece of cake to use a vise-grip on it.  It came right out.

Speaking of replacing pots.  A couple of things with the tone control.  First, it was not wired correctly at all.  The tone cap should connect to one outside lug of the pot, which is where it was connected.  However, the middle (wiper) lug wasn't connected to anything!  So it wouldn't do anything.

I rewired it with the middle lug going to ground.  What it does now is filter off highs to ground.  I also wired it so that turning it counterclockwise rolls of the highs.  The original factory wiring was the reverse - which is not the way they're usually wired.  So I just used the modern convention.

The old pot itself was shot.  I got all kinds of crazy readings on it - mainly open!  So I put a new 250K CTS pot in there.

I also wanted to change the tone cap value - I opted for an .033 uF instead of the original .05 uF.  I find .05 to be a little too fast (i.e., rolls off treble too quickly) and dark for my taste.  I did use a Russian K40-9Y PIO cap since I have a bunch of them on hand.

Someone put what I believe to be an aftermarket nut on it.  It's stamped "A P&M Co."  From what I can determine, these folks made bars (slides) and other accessories.  The nut popped off when I took the strings off, so I used epoxy to fasten it back on.

Here you see the caul/clamp I used to hold the nut in place while the epoxy set.

I see a wood shim and I want to paint it black.

Someone put a wood shim under the front of the nut to prevent it from tilting forward under string pressure.  (This is why I suspect it was an addition).

I reused the shim, but I decided to paint it black to better blend with the fingerboard color.

With all of the other work done, I polished up the chrome on the big mounting plate for the pickup and bridge.  It's in great shape, and polishing it really made it look terrific.

I also used a fine grade rubbing compound to polish the whole guitar, and I also polished the plastic fingerboard.

The guitar has definitely seen some use, but it's been well taken care of.

You may recall my research on the Hickok factory in Cleveland.  I decided to see if I could get a picture of the former Valco factory in Chicago where this lap steel was made.

The street address was 4700 West Walton St., Chicago 51 (now 60651).  Here's the building as it appears today, thanks to Google Earth.  Unlike Hickok, there is nothing visible on the pictures related to Valco.  Of course, Valco was out of business in 1968, so everything is probably long gone.

As with the Hickok factory, this is a smaller building than I would have thought.  Apparently this was the manufacturing plant; the sales offices were not at this location.