Inlaying pickguards

[teb]

This place has a big selection of various types of recon stone (including turquoise) and they're cheaper than LMI.

http://www.masecraftsupply.com/Merchant ... Code=RECON

It's stone dust (some dyed) mixed with polyester resin and poured into an aluminum foil loaf pan. Once hardened, they slab it out with a band saw to the desired thickness. It sands and machines reasonably easily (much more like resin than like working with stone). The best "glue" for it is epoxy resin (less chance of solvent "melt-down" than with polyester resin and minimal resin shrinkage). I suspect that it's a lot easier to do your gap filling with dust from the stome mixed with resin than trying to match the white of the plexi. Option #2 would be to do the entire inlay as a pour of resin mixed with recon stone chips. It can be crushed with a hammer to the desired chip size. All you need is a screen to sort the chips and a cardboard box to keep them from all flying away. The best resin that I know of for such stuff is a rather thin (fewer trapped air bubbles) very clear, hard epoxy from System Three. It's pricey though because even the smallest kit (1.5 pints) is enough to inlay the Queen Mary.

http://www.woodcraft.com/family.aspx?familyid=4140

They're using this type of recon-stone-chip/epoxy inlay technique on things like custom pool cues, knife handles and fountain pens.

[teb]

Mike, I love brainstorming unusual ideas like this. It keeps me from getting old and becoming a normal, productive member of society. I'll toss out some ideas at random. Use what you can and ignore anything that doesn't fit the mold.

I started messing with the recon stone a while back. I'm kicking around the possible idea of having my nicely-figured Mapleglow 340/12 bound and fingerboard inlays installed by Dale or PW using some turquoise for sort of a "330 Navajo" look. I bought a couple of chunks to play with and the guy also sent me some scrap cut-offs for crushing, so I did some tests with both crushed and slabbed stone. Being a resin/stone mix it is fairly hard, but I didn't have any serious trouble sanding it down flush on some bubinga test chunks. I suspect that it sands very similarly to the old Rickenbacker poured fingerboard inlays. I did learn that when it comes to cutting a hole and then cutting a plug that perfectly fills it, I'm not your man, but all I had to work with were a radial arm saw, an old band saw and a Dremel, which aren't the best tools for delicate work. Poured fills are quite a bit easier.

Sanding the inlayed face of a plexiglass hunk and getting it back to flat, shiny and scratch-free is a fair amount of work, but it can be done. When I was in college I worked for a sculptor and we made big circular plexiglass bases for his sculptures to sit on. We cut them with beveled edges out of 3/4" thick plexi with a sabre-saw, cutting along a bead of motor oil for lubrication. Then we started with a wooden block and 60 grit sandpaper by hand and continued all the way up through 1000 grit, wet-sanding and finally buffed the edges with a power buffer. Needless to say, having a wet, slippery 24" disk of expensive plastic slide out of your hands and hit the floor when you're 7/8 done with the project can really spoil your whole day. So I think you could successfully sand the inlay flush, but it will take some elbow grease and you have to really work up through the grits carefully.

For white filler on white plexiglass, the first thing I would try might be sanding dust from white plexi mixed with just enough clear resin to hold it together. If it worked, it might be easier than trying to get a match with pigments since there are so many different shades of white. In general though, I think I would use clear plexi and back-paint the guards white. I've built a whole pile of guards for my Ricks and there is no doubt that those made from clear plastic and then painted on the back side (vintage-style) look much more classy than those from white plexiglass (plus clear acrylic is easier to find). The back-painted guards just have a nice depth and shimmer that you don't get with solid white plastic. They would also allow you to do any needed fills around the inlay with clear resin and let the back-painting add the white color.. If you polish the edges during the building process and maybe add a little bevel or round, you also get some really cool optical effects and the edges glow.




Another thought would be to rout, inlay and fill on clear acrylic from the back side, assuming that the routs don't go all the way through. You can chop the heck out of the surface of a hunk of clear plexi, coat it with clear epoxy during the glue-in/filling process and the chop marks will virtually disappear when the resin hits them. It might not need any sanding at all on the back side and the front side would still be smooth and un-touched. In my case - being a bit dyslexic, I'd simply have to remember to write backwards as my mind's eye has a perfect picture of me pulling the paper off and seeing a gorgeous inlay that only reads correctly in a mirror.

I do temper my plexi after cutting and working on it to help relieve stress that builds up in it when machining it. After polishing and cutting and before painting it, I stick it on a flat baking sheet, put it in a 175 degree F oven for two hours, turn it off and let it cool down over a couple more hours in the oven. Supposedly, it helps keep the stuff from cracking at screw holes, etc. and it's easy enough to do that it's probably worth the trouble. Most cured epoxy fills (like around inlays) will start to soften at around 140 degrees, but it's unlikely that they will be damaged if allowed to cool off slowly with the rest of the piece.

Anyway, just some assorted food for thought that might be of help. These are my inlay samples on scrap bubunga - one with solid slabs and two with crushed stone. The crushed ones are a bit dark because I was using assorted scrap turquoise chips and some very old boatbuilding epoxy that had been sitting out in the garage for several years. The hardener for this brand of resin gets very brown as it ages in the can. With different resin they would be clearer and brighter. The question on my project is what to do with the rest of the guitar to go with the turquoise inlays? So far, my only decent thought might be to skip the checkerboard binding (which is REALLY hard to pass up) and maybe do something like on a Martin D45, but with small turquoise inlay chunks between two strips of binding instead of the pearly/abalone stuff they use. I'd be happy to sit there and fit all those little pieces, but don't know whether I could afford to pay a pro to do it.

[grazioso]

lovely! i like that very much. that darker one would imho look awesome with the guitar body wrapped in some tan leather.

[teb]

This was my orignal Photoshop concept cartoon for the Navajo. It's very difficult to pass up the idea of regular checkerboard binding and crushed pearl inlays, but I kind of like this one as long as the turquoise on the fingerboard can be echoed somehow on the body to balance things out visually. I'm even thinking about a Mapleglow top, bound only on the top, and something about the color of Autumnglow or Monte on the sides and back. The binding would make for an easy separation line, but the tailpiece area would need to be a clean masked line like some of the guitars you see with masked binding. This is my spare twelve that I bought because I play my Arnquisted FGWB so much that I was afraid I'd wear it out. I don't mind pushing the cosmetic envelope a bit on this one. I could also maybe checker-bind the top and build pickguards with a plexi center and cast turquoise chip edges to echo the fingerboard inlays. If the turquoise idea doesn't look like it will pan-out there is always checkerboard and crushed pearl to fall back on.

[teb]

Tan Leather??? I still have tan leather left over from the "Hippy-Buffalo-Bill" period in the early 1970's (which I'm not at all sure I ever really emerged from...). A turquoise-inlayed twelve would go pretty nicely with that jacket - at least until you started sweating.

[teb]

That white was some sort of white spray enamel from an automotive store (good stuff, not the bargain kind). I use tiny bits of artist's rice paper around the screw holes on the back side of the guard to eliminate any possibility of paint pulling off and sticking to the guitar and masking tape around the pot-holes, like the old Ricks had. The easiest way to match colors is always to make both guards. If you have a good way to cut the plexi (I use a band saw and a fine blade) the rest is just hand sanding using a block and you can make a set in an hour or two. I get 1/8" acrylic sheet from a glass company and a hunk big enough to make a set of guards only costs about $4.00, even at their rather inflated prices. I have noticed that certain brands of clear acrylic tend to be slightly bluer (or greyer) than others when you paint the back white and you just have to experiment to find one that looks right and a specific paint. This is a bit annoying, but I had even more trouble back when I was trying to find white plexi that had similar opacity to the original Rickenbacker white stuff. Nothing I could find locally was quite as white and opaque. Switching to back-painted clear guards and replacing both of them with the new, matching ones fixed that problem.

I'm not sure how or if there is a way to make the inlay stand slightly proud of the surface unless you can cut the pieces that way and avoid needing to do any sanding after they're glued-in, but I'm certainly not an inlay expert. Every scenario that I can think of pretty much involves inlaying, filling as needed, sanding it flat and then polishing out the entire surface of the guard. You could silk-screen the back, but even with the quickie photo-copy silk-screen kits that will make a screen using an ink-jet copy as a master you're looking at $40-$50 to get started and make your first screen. That's pretty expensive for a single name. I'd probably see what the local engravers might be able to do before going the silk screen route.

[johnallg]

Beautiful wall art, Todd! I'm enjoying this thread. Interesting look to the turq. inlay/trimmed 12'er. I like the broken bit/poured look better then the sheet cut look. Personally.

When buying the clear acrylic, what about holding a sheet of white paper behind it to gauge the amount of blue, gray, or clearness it has?

[teb]

That might help, but the stuff comes with tan paper stuck to it, so you would have to convince them that you needed to see a chunk with the paper peeled off. Chances are, if you could get them to go in the back to the cutting tables there would be some in the scrap bin to look at. Generally the pieces needed to make a pick guard set are small enough that you may be able to use some scrap plastic that they otherwise might just toss out - and sometimes you can get a pretty good deal on it. The last set I built from white plexi came from an oddly-shaped piece of scrap and they sold it to me for $1. I had never noticed the color differences in the clear plexi until the last set I made. That particular guitar has a vintage plexi TRC. My previous set of guards matched the TRC quite well. I made another set for it, used the same can of white paint on the back and couldn't figure out why they weren't quite as bright and white as the first set I built? I started comparing little leftover chunks of plastic and you could see a slight difference in color before painting. In general though, assuming you're making both guards from the new plastic and just matching a molded TRC it doesn't matter much. They will still look really good.

By the way, if you're doing this type of work I suggest going to the Woodcraft site (or similar) and picking up a set of 5" Micro-Mesh sanding disks. For about $17 you get a whole pile of them ranging from 1,500 grit up through 12,000 grit. They're made for random orbit sanders with a heavy backing, but I use them by hand or wrapped around a block of wood for flat surfaces and I generally use them wet. They last a long time that way and are the best high-tech sandpaper I have ever used. The 5" disk set seems to be a better value than the small squares that they sell elsewhere. 12,000 grit, by the way. feels almost like a piece of leather and after working through the grits and up to it you can do your final buffing by hand with a diaper and some polishing compound. I don't own a power buffer, so I have used Micro-Mesh and hand buffing for all of my pick guard edges and even the finish on my 2030 body. Good stuff!

http://www.woodcraft.com/family.aspx?familyid=5232

[grazioso]

Tan Leather??? I still have tan leather left over from the "Hippy-Buffalo-Bill" period in the early 1970's (which I'm not at all sure I ever really emerged from...). A turquoise-inlayed twelve would go pretty nicely with that jacket - at least until you started sweating.

hahaha, i have one just like that.