Here's all the material and tools for making pickguards for this build. The shapes get traced on the black pickguard material and then rough cut on the bandsaw.
Next the rough cut material is attached to the templates with double sided tape. You have to be careful to stick the right side to the template or you'll end up with left handed pickguards!
Next the templates are routed with a straight router bit to get the shape right, then they're beveled with a different router bit. The areas that are up against the neck are not beveled. Pickguard routing causes a snowstorm of plastic flakes that statically cling to everything. Now the edges just need to be cleaned up a little with a razor blade and then it's time to drill mounting holes.
Single coil pickups are notoriously noisy things, so I do everything I can to quiet them. Three coats of shielding paint are applied to all cavities waiting 24 hours between coats. Then a ground wire is run from the pickup cavities to a common ground point in the control cavity. The wire from the bridge pickup cavity that extends over the body is for grounding the bridge. Technically its not required since the pickup mounting screws will ground the bridge, but better safe than sorry! A little conductive copper shielding tape holds the wire in place and makes greater contact with the underside of the bridge.
Pots and switches are soldered and tested, then the back of the pickguard gets more copper shielding. After taking this picture I also added a little piece of shielding tape from over each of the pickguard screw holes in the body and into the control cavity. When the pickguard is screwed in place the shileding on the pickguard contacts those little pieces of tape and ties it into the shielding of the cavity effectively encasing the entire control cavity in a shielded box!
Here's everything all buttoned up! All that's missing is to peel the plastic film off the pickguards and install the control knobs. Yes, that's the reflection of the light over my kitchen table (it was cold out in my workshop that day!).
At this point I installed the tuners (I forgot to take pics), oiled the fretboard, rough cut the nut and strung it up. I like to let a new neck sit under string tension for quite a while before doing the initial set up just to let it settle a bit.
