From John Peden

K&F Lap Steel with Amplifier
K&F Manufacturing Corporation
Anaheim, California
Around 1945

The K&F lap-steel was radio repairman Leo Fender's initial electric guitar design. He created it with "Doc" Kauffman, who had worked for Adolph Rickenbacker's Electro String Instrument Corporation.

Completed around 1943, the first K&F had a solid oak body and mail-ordered fingerboard, and was originally intended to be played like a Spanish guitar. But Kauffman and Fender's Direct String Pickup, based on early phonograph pickups, proved better suited to the Hawaiian style. They applied for a patent on their pickup in 1944; it was granted four years later, after Kauffman had left the company.