“Jerry Garcia” Guitar Re-Build (part 4)

I feel like I can finally start dividing these build stories into specific jobs, as the jobs that remain are all reasonably large and separate.

The Pickguard

I’ve settled on a red one. For now.

Jerry’s guitars didn’t have pickguards – just pickup mounting rings – and I think they were brass or some other metal. The course that this project has taken means that a pickguard is now essential because the electronics are all mounted through the front, but I don’t mind – this is not a replica, it’s simply based on his guitars in terms of body shape.

It turns out that finding plain red pickguard material is difficult. If it exists, I have yet to find it, so for the time being I’m using 3mm opaque red perspex, and if I can find a nice plain red laminated blank, the perspex version will become a robust template. Originally I was thinking of red faux tortoise shell, but I can’t find one that doesn’t look printed, but if that situation changes I’ll likely go for that. There’s just something about plain red that I think will work really well. It looks like blood spatter, which sort of suits the skull-like shape of the guitar. It just needs to work with the sunburst finish, is all.

The shape of the pickguard went through quite a few iterations, and the final form basically flows around the shape of the body, avoided the sharp corners. In order to make the pickguard fit perfectly around the neck-body junction, I took a plaster cast of the area and made a stencil.

Once the shape was cut out and roughly beveled, I was in a hurry to get it screwed to the body for final adjustments, and in doing so failed to place the screws intelligently. As a result I now have some patching to do, both on the pickguard itself and on the body of the guitar. I shall report in once I’ve done some experimenting with this.

Images to follow…