A Wood Victory

A while ago, I bought a mahogany Soloist body from eBay.

I admit, I don’t need ANY more guitars, but this one was a crazy bargain. I decided to finish it clear, since the wood is so nice.

As I was looking at the pickups that would go in it, one of them fell out of its cover.

I didn’t know these pickups would do that.

I started thinking… Woodn’t (!) it be nice to do something different?

I think I just found the title of my autobiography.

I started to wonder whether or not I could make wooden pickup covers.

It’s not a problem for the pickup; it ‘reads’  the strings through wood easily, as long as the wood’s not too thick.

I was just unsure of how to execute the principle. Because when wood gets thin, it gets very fragile.*I am, therefore, a very un-fragile person.* *This is a router template. It is used for routing a single-coil pickup rout into the face of a guitar body.*

*****It is the same shape as the cavities routed into the face of the Soloist.*

Therefore, anything cut to that shape should fit into the cavity.

In theory, anyway.

So I cut some wood to that shape, using my new disk sander to get the lines straight, smooth, and square (more or less).

*Before I cut out the outline, I made two cuts near the ends, and after the outline was done I used a coping saw to cut out that big hunk of the middle.*

I used my Dremel tool to rout out some room for the pickup wires to sit in so they didn’t take up any room in the pickup cavity.

*****So far so good; the wood fits in the cavity and the pickup fits in the wood.*

I had bought some thin mahogany at a local hobby shop, and glued the wood pieces to it for the tops of the covers.****

Here we see the process, as the body of the cover is clamped to the top.****

*Note the notch filed into the bottom for the wire from the pickup.*

A little drying time, some sanding, and…

*****Voila! We have coverage, so to speak.*

*****At first, I left the front face of the covers open, because… well, because I was doing this for the first time.*

*What I mean is, next time will be different/better.*

But when I put the pickups in the guitar, I noticed something.

It looks okay from the front, but look at it from the neck:

*****It’s not awful, but I didn’t like it.*

I decided to add some mahogany veneer, which is very thin and fragile, to the front of the covers.

*****While I was at it, I thought that the guitar deserved special knobs too.*

I used a hole saw, a drill bit with variable size attachments, to cut out knob-sized pieces of mahogany.

I glued these to a layer of ebony veneer and some of the thin mahogany.

*A little sanding later:*

*I added a dot using fretboard side marker material.*

*****They’re not all the same exact same size, but for a first effort I feel pretty good about them.*

Now I have a full set of mahogany accessories for the guitar.

*****I think it will look nice.*

*****Especially since now you can’t see the pickups from this angle!*

*********I’ve never really liked gold hardware on guitars, but this one seems to really scream for it.  We’ll see…*