more pickguards

One realized benefit of the full kit is the limited decision making involved in parts. On the other hand, the downside is you have to work with what is provided even if it might not be the best fit or quality. 

Pickguards are a basic example of this. The Stewmac kit provides a nice basic black pickguard with chamftered edges showing black and white layers. It's good but not great but not crap either. 

I thought this might be an area to do some customizing. So I've looked into different materials, including: 

• plastic
• bakelite
• wood
• copper

PART 1

You can go as crazy as you want with this. And if you have some artistic vision, skill and the right tools, you can really go to town. The guy at Flatt Guitars in Tacoma makes super cool pickguards.I love this Ebony Gator pickguard. 

I'm not close to that level of ability, but I wanted something other than the basic colour. At first I was thinking the copper would be a cool look, but I wasn't sure about the tools needed. Apparently, you can get a tool called a nibbler that you can fasten to your drill to shape the metal. 

But I saw a few wooden pickguards that looked cool. I was wondering about shaping the wood, whether I needed a router or a scroll saw, neither of which I have. I did see on YouTube a guy made a pickguard out of wood veneer, which is thin enough to cut with scissors. That's my level of craftsmanship. 

So I bought some walnut veneer at Michaels. Seems overpriced at $15 so I should look for alternatives. 

Here's what it looked like after shaping:

That is a nice woody look, but it doesn't match the guitar body, so I want to darken the wood to something close to black.I sanded this lightly with some 400 grit so it is completely smooth. It is glued to a plastic pickguard that Scott cut on his laser cutter. It is a little bit thicker than the black plastic pickguard that came with the kit. It feels pretty solid.

The glueing was a bit of a gong show. I did not do a good job of this. In general I think I would do this differently. I would glue a veneer blank to my clear plastic pickguard and then cut it out after the glue had dried. The way I've done it here, there are a few places where it doesn't quite line up some I'm missing a sliver of wood. I will try to sand that back. 

PART 2 

I drilled the screw holes.and tried my hand at countersinking the holes for a better set up and to let the kit screws fit. I did that with my cordless drill and a countersink bit. The trick was going through the veneer and then to the plastic/epoxy without tearing out the veneer. 

I seemed to manage with that. Afterwards, I applied a coat of black minwax gel stain. I was persuaded to go with the gel stain instead of the regular stain simply because the gel seems a bit more foolproof. Someone described it as a cross between stain and paint. I wanted to get the wood as dark as possible while keeping the grain visible. The walnut is nice but probably wouldn't work for this particular guitar body.

So below is the set up for drilling and staining. My bench is sitting under an umbrella while it rains lightly outside. 

And then here is the result of a single coat. What a difference!!

I'm pretty happy with the results. One of the holes looks a bit out of place but I guess that doesn't matter too much if I'm only drilling to suit this pickguard. 

Earlier today, I bought a couple of small sheets of birch plywood from DeSerres. (a couple bucks each). I might experiment with cutting another pickguard. I like the idea of using wood as long as I can put a hard clear finish on it after. The interesting thing to note is I could try different colours at some later point to change the look of the guitar. But my preliminary look at the dark stained pickguard suggests this is the right colour. It looks awesome.