A couple of days ago I made a new pick guard template from paper - lot's of cutting and sticking until I got the right shape. Today I transferred it onto ply wood and cut it out. Again, I used the plate from the kit to cut the neck and the pickups so everything lined up.

Then I went for it... I don't have a band saw and I thought my jigsaw would be too heavy duty for the pick guard material. So instead I used a cutting disc on my Dremel to rough cut. I tried using the router bit to just carve through it but that seemed a bit sketchy. Then I used a chamfer bit to get, well... a chamfer.

But it's turned out okay I think. Not perfect but useable. There's a couple of places where is gone a bit wonky due to the ply wood template (and it being my first attempt at anything like this).

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I'm pleased with the knob spacing and I like the clean lines of it being all black (not multiply). I've tried to make it follow the lines of the body in the key places and I think I've got it well enough. I still have the holes for the pots and switch to drill and counter sink all the other holes.

The things I've learnt:

  1. Don't make templates out of ply wood. They chip out too easily. In one of the pickup cut outs the inner ply tore out leaving just the outer skins... Not good enough for the router bearing to follow leading to one of the wonky bits.
  2. Scratch plate material comes with two layers of plastic on it. I spent a few minutes trying to polish out scratches that were in the second layer before I realised
  3. Avoid making your own scratch plate. Cutting it out is messy. The little chips of plastic go everywhere and stick to everything. As I'm typing this I'm still finding them in places where they should not have got. They're also all over the house even though I did it all outside.


If I was doing it again I would try to mount the router upside down and clamp it to a table. Hand holding it makes it less stable I think. It would also remove the "clamp, route, unclamp, move" dance.

I'd also buy a band saw and some kind of sanding machine before attempting this again. Both of these would make the whole process less arduous. I think it would be done in a couple of hours rather than half a day.

It's getting close now. I think I'm ready to start wiring and assembly?