After having pretty killer results with the abalone T-bird, I wanted to see how hard it would be to make a pickguard out of this stuff.
I (and my client) was quite pleased with the results.
See the process below:
The Process:
Started out with two 9"x5" abalone sheets.
The sheets themselves are very thin – thinner than an electric guitar’s high E string – so I had to pour onto the shell sheets a 1/16" layer of tabletop epoxy, pictured above.
Before this, the 2 sheets were overlapped 1/4" and glued with a very fine layer of superglue, so the seam wouldn’t look obvious within the final product.
As for the casting mold, I shim-levelled the bookmatching deck then covered the surface in wax paper and made a pretty rudimentary reservoir for the epoxy out of masking tape.
Hey, it got the job done.
The next day. Epoxy is dry and removed from the casting mold.
The rough shape of the new pickguard was cut on the bandsaw, and the final shaping was done by attaching an existing Tele pickguard, and trimming flush with a bottom-bearing router bit.
With the pickguard shaped and neck pickup routed, the entire back of it was covered in copper shielding.
This was done for 2 reasons: 1) to safeguard against 60-cycle hum (and static), but also 2) since the shell is so thin, in certain lighting it can be semi-translucent.
The copper provides a reflective surface on the back of the shell that enhances its opalescence.
After some minor sanding on the edges to clean up the router marks, the pickguard is done!
