Saturday, 19 October 2013

Another Ukulele Project - Making A DLP Custom Pick Guard

I would like to make my guitars (and ukuleles) look unique as a way of making the DLP Guitars brand recognisable, so while the general shape of the Telecaster is unchanged, there is scope to be creative and individual with the pick guard.  With this in mind I have decided to use something like my idea below of an oval shaped pick guard.


I have ordered a pickup, bridge and machine heads for the Telecaster Ukulele so while I'm waiting for them to arrive I thought I would make a start on the pick guard.


I started off by making a rough cardboard template just to give me an idea of how much blank material I would need and general proportions of the pick guard.  I will be using un-etched single sided copper coated PCB to make the guard, leaving the copper side polished and exposed.  It should gradually darken with age.


I roughed out the shape, the material can actually be cut carefully with good scissors but I stopped well clear of the outline as it does have a habit of  splintering and splitting. I then used my bench grinder to gradually shape the pick guard.


Once I had the oval shape I marked the position of the neck and nibbled the material away with the bench grinder.  I then used files to get the neck cut-out perfect and finally finished the edges to give a nice even gap all round.


I will have to wait for the bridge and the pickup to arrive before I can do anything else with it, but I'm please with the results so far.

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