BUILD IT! PLAY IT! LOVE IT!
Building a hot-mod guitar – pt 4 This month, Simon Croft finishes off the flashy new scratch-plate for his new self-built guitar project, cutting some fancy curves and the slot for the pickup selector…
f you read last month’s Hot Mods article, you know that I made up a cardboard template for my new scratch-plate to make sure that it was a good fit for my project guitar. Then I stuck that to the back of the plastic sheet to give me a cutting guide. Here’s how I finished the job off.
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Scratch-plate material makes a fair bit off mess when you cut it, so I took the job outside and cut my plate on a wooden patio table. Providing you clamp the plate, any sturdy table will do the job. That said; you’ll probably slip with the saw now and then, so I wouldn’t advise attempting this on the dining room furniture!
Fig. 1 - Rough cut: You don’t have to be ultra-accurate with your initial saw cuts, as long as you don’t stray over the line.
Providing you take your time, cutting round the template with a coping saw is fairly easy. (fig 1) It doesn’t matter if you leave a bit of surplus material on the plate because you can file that off later. What you don’t want to do, of course, is go
over the line of the template and start cutting into the scratch-plate you want to end up with. To cut out areas such as a hole for a pickup,
you’ll need to drill through the plate within the pickup area, push the coping saw blade through, then attach it to the saw frame. I suggest you make sure you have some spare blades to hand because I often find that when you’re trying to cut tight angles, the blade suddenly gets stuck and snaps. Bad news if you’ve then got to drive to B&Q…
Getting in trim… Trimming the surplus material is best done in the early stages with a combination of a flat engineer’s file, a half-round file and a rat-tail file. Because these three files are such a useful combination, you can often buy all three as a set. I got a set in Poundland, which means they cost me about 33p each! Getting really smooth curves using files alone is
nigh on impossible, so I improvised some curved sanding blocks using objects including a plastic drinks bottle (fig 2), an insect repellent container, a reel of masking tape and a container for DVD blanks. It doesn’t matter what you use as long as the material isn’t too hard and the curves are useful for the shapes you’re working on. Next, grab yourself some really coarse abrasive
paper (I used the 80 grade builder’s merchants sell for sanding floors), pull it round your former and start smoothing away. Bit-by-bit you’ll start to get really professional-looking curves.
Filing the pickup cut-out was something I was
Fig. 2 - You’re round! Household containers of various diameters can be used as sanding blocks to get great-looking curves.
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www.playmusicpickup.co.uk
really careful about (fig 3) because I wanted the corners to match the radius of the pickup itself. It would be much easier to cut a simple rectangle but that wouldn’t have looked half as neat. I worked on the four sides with a flat file (fig 4), avoiding the corners as much as possible. Once I was sure the sides were right, I worked into the corners with the rat-tail file (Fig 5). It took a lot of checking with the pickup to see if I was ‘there yet’ but I ended up with a really snug fit. If your pickup has sharper corners than mine, you may need to use a round needle file instead. With the pickup pushed into place, I drilled two
pilot holes for the mounting bolts. I wrapped making tape round the drill, so that it would only
cut through the plastic and not mess up the threads on the pickup. Then I removed the pickup and drilled the full-sized holes.
Cutting the slot for the selector switch was
pretty hairy, because I had to: 1) drill a series of undersized holes along the line of the slot, 2) join them up with a small saw and then, 3) enlarge and smooth out the slot with a flat needle file. Not only did it take quite a long time but I was very aware that if I screwed this up, my plate was scrap. To join the holes up, I used an X-Acto saw, which is also very useful for cutting nut slots for unwound strings. An X-Acto isn’t expensive but they can be hard to find. An alternative would be to knock the retaining pin out of the end of a junior hacksaw blade, then wrap some tape round the other end to form a handle.
Fig. 3 - Inside story: To get the blade into the pickup area, drill some holes, slip the blade through, then attach it to the coping saw frame.
By comparison, drilling the holes for the pots and jack socket was easy, although I had to get the holes up to size with the rat-tail file. To be honest with you, I keep changing my mind about the electrics. I was going to have a three-knob Strat setup. Then I decided to go for a two-knob Tele setup but with a TBX active tone and the jack where the third control would have been. My current plan is to put a volume and tone
control in there for the dry build, and just see how the guitar sounds. With the Tele pickup in the bridge and a substantial piece of maple for the top, this guitar is likely to have a clear, bright tone that a TBX could easily turn very brittle. Once I know what the signature sound of the guitar is, I’ll probably expand it a little by using a
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