And shinier.

Pickup cavity routed

After I attached the pickups to the pickguard, I discovered that the pickguard then didn't fit on the body very well. The pickups didn't exactly fit in the holes. On the neck pickup cavity, some of the wood touched the pickup, which turned out to be no problem, I just carved on it a little bit with a chisel.











The bridge pickup cavity, however, needed to be routed. It took me a little while to get it together in my refurbished workspace, but I put together a little jig made of clamps and scrap boards and then went to it. I should've taken a picture. It was kind of interesting-looking. Here's the end result.










And now the pickguard is finally flush with the body, and has pickups attached.






















Next, I'll do something about that finish.

And shinier

Here's what the headstock looks like after a few coats of wipe on poly.

The headstock is getting shinier too

Holes cut in pickguard

I drilled holes in the pickguard today. The pickguard is a little bit fragile. If the pickguard ever gets taken off the guitar, the weight of the humbucker might break the thin wood around it.

The lower part of the pickguard is kind of crowded. How does the knob configuration look? There's also the output jack and the pickup selector switch to think about. No holes have been drilled there, yet.

I also started sanding the guitar body today. It'll take some work to get all the old finish off. I did a test on the back with some polycrylic. On the portions where there was no finish, just bare wood, the grain popped and the finish looked really nice. On the parts where there was finish, and the polycrylic was just going over top of it, it looked really dull. So I will want to get all of the finish off of the guitar, going down to bare wood, before finishing it again.

If the pickguard looks dull again it's because I wet sanded it with 2000 grit for a while yesterday.




































































































I found those really teeny washers for the pickup screws at Lowe's.

The pickguard is getting shinier

Did I mention that you can't buy a melody maker pickguard like this anywhere?

Gibsun

After I put lacquer on the headstock, and leveled it, I applied the decal. The decal is kind of thick. Maybe I should've put it right on the paint, and put all of my coats of lacquer over top of it. Oh well. I think it looks pretty good.






























As you can see in the picture, up close, the edges don't look quite perfect. That's because they're not. The guitar is old and the corners aren't quite perfectly square. I didn't want to sand off a lot of wood to make the corners even again. And even if I did try to do that, I'm afraid I would just do it unevenly.