1940s Magnatone Lap Steel Electric Guitar

I cleaned this guy all up, checked on its wiring, tweaked the "nut" and "saddle" bars, and restrung this guy a week after it arrived. The next day a friend of mine asked if we had any lap steels. He took it home and, after much back and forth in internal monologue (he has a hard time enjoying "budget" guitars despite how intrinsically awesome they can be), finally decided to buy it. 

These Magnatone-made instruments (this one is unlabeled save for a retailer mark at the headstock, but many bear the Dickerson mark, among others) are lightweight and, like Danelectros, have exceedingly-cool efficiency of design.

The body has a "lifted" section on its bass side which makes a great palm-rest for the picking hand, the pickup cover also serves as a hand ground to your picking hand, and the nut and saddle are simply bent-over heavy-gauge wire which is surprisingly-effective and also serves as a second, easy ground point for the harness at the bridge end. The pearloid wrap keeps it clean-looking even after many decades and they definitely have a "presence" about them that I like a lot. They're very practical, functional instruments.

The weirdest bit is that the pickups are set into the body (they're a bar-magnet, single-coil affair with a vaguely Fender-meets-Dano sound that's delicious) and that pickup cavity is then filled with wax and the pearloid wrap covers over the pickup. This necessitates a lower-to-the-body string height but that also means the whole thing is compact, too, and I've never had any "bar lift" problems because of that.