Pickguards: Less For Noses Than Guitars

I was debating whether or not to put a pickguard on the Less Paul.

Eddie Van Halen's had one, but that doesn't mean I have to do it.Besides, the pickguard on his guitar is not necessarily accurate. Which I confess sounds terribly anal retentive, but remember that my intention is to try and make a miniature Les Pal and not to slavishly reproduce his guitar.

You can see in the photo below the way a regular Les Paul pickguard looks.

I should stipulate that this is not a Gibson Les Paul but is in fact a Japanese copy. Therefore, the entire guitar (including the pickguard) is historically accurate in design and construction, well made, and a much better value for $. In short: Gibson guitars suck."You'll get a pickguard during puberty, dear. More knobs, too..."I ordered some creme pickguard material from Stewart MacDonald and figured I may as well try.

First, I covered part of the material in masking tape. This is to protect the plastic while I work on it.

It has a film on it already, but I'm 1/4 Polish and figured I'll take all the help I can get...

Step 1: mark position of pickups:Step 2: Using the pickup ring, draw the edges of where the cuts will be:Step 3: Using a coping saw, cut out the rough outline:I left some extra around the places where the lines will go, figuring I can work towards them slowly and hopefully minimize disasters:Step 4: Cut out pickup spaces:Not bad looking:But with the pickups in, you can see that the pickup cuts are too big:Now, to be fair, Gibson's quality control is even lower than this, but I don't much care for the way this looks.

I may do a semi-'cheat' and order a pickguard from Warmoth for a guitar that's cut out for these pickups, and then just cut out my pickguard from that one.

By doing that, I'll (theoretically) get very accurate pickup cutouts, and the rest of the cuts are very easy to do.

So it will look better than this one.

Which doesn't look bad, but doesn't look good either! I may not update the Less Paul project for a while, because it is now drying. Nitrocellulose lacquer takes 2-3 weeks to dry fully before you can buff it out, so the guitar is hanging in the workshop and I need to leave it alone.