Excel Superb 12 String Keyless Pedal Steel Guitar With Franklin Pedal

This is a follow on to my original detailed Excel Keyless review which can be seen here:

This short page will show updates made to my 12 string Excel keyless pedal steel guitar to add the popular Franklin pedal changes. Shown below are two copedants both with the Franklin pedal change. The First copedant shows the total of all changes with the changeover lock lever in both the E9th and C6 positions. The second copedant chart shows the usable changes out of all the total possible changes. I've added three C6 knee levers since first purchasing this guitar used in addition to adding the Franklin changes covered here. Basically I converted the old C6 pedal changes into the Franklin changes by reusing two existing cranks and pull rods and adding another crank and pull rod to pedal 4. This guitar is getting pretty crowded underneath and I spent a good two hours moving stuff around a bit to make this happen.

Note that the two right knee levers each have two cross shafts with their own unique changes. Moving the lock lever between its two positions selects between one set of two changes for those two right knee levers. The lock lever also reconfigures all the strings from an extended E9th tuning to an extended C6 tuning. The lock lever does not affect any of the other knee levers or pedals but some individual changes will pull different distances depending on the position of the lock lever as the lever moves individual raise and lower levers for each string.

Another unique feature of this guitar is that there are no reverse linkages on the knee levers that move to the right direction. Instead bell crank pullers are mounted underneath the cross shafts and pull on a separate set of changer holes that are exposed and reachable between the cross shafts and the body of the guitar. This is an EXTREMELY light and compact guitar with an unbelievably light case! See my original review of this guitar in the link posted above for many more details.

Copedant charts

Changer end view with functional description

The lock lever moves a bar that has adjustable screws to engage the bottom two rows of changer fingers. One row raises and one row lowers. Mine is setup to change from E9 to C6 open tunings but that is user programmable and within reason it would be possible to have the lock raise or lower any string as desired. The changer can be viewed as being a 7 raise and 4 lower unit with one raise and one lower dedicated to the lock lever function. Note that the lock lever changes only RKL, RKR and the open tuning. It is not a complete changeover mechanism. The tuning of the other knee levers and pedal is not user programmable. A few rows of changer raises/lowers are accessed by bell cranks that mount BELOW the cross rod. This is necessary because with 30 pull rods feeding the changer, it get pretty crowded on the top side of the pedal/knee lever cross shafts. In a few cases the lock lever changing moving the changer fingers does affect some of the knee lever/pedal functions. My complete tuning procedure is:

Excel Superb 12 String Keyless Pedal Steel Guitar With Franklin Pedal

Sound Samples with Stage One foot volume and Fender Steel King. mic'd with a Shure SM-57. All samples recorded onto a Zoom R24 then ported to Reaper to convert them to mp3 files at 320 kbps

Click on pictures to see them full size or at least sized to a browser window. Click on the picture again if needed to zoom in even more!