montage said:
Do you have an approximate cost for what you're doing? Just curious...
If I was to go out and pay for materials and machine time and design and programming etc, for just one set, pickguard, backplate, neck plate, 304 stainless steel, custom engraved, would be a minimum of a thousand dollars.
I will break it down, material-25 dollars, machine set up for first time run fixture making and fixture design, 8 hrs at 60 to 100 an hour depending on the shop, Programming, 2 hours, drawing and design which can get time consuming so lets say 10 hrs at the most at about the same prices, (alot of the time, alot of this time is absorbed by the shop).
Lets say 2 hrs run time at the most at the same prices. All secondary work, lets say 2 hrs at the same cost, then clearcoating, don't know the cost, allways slip it in with the shop work, it doesn't cost them anymore, they pay a flat fee per x amount.
So you can see at first the cost is very high, but now the programs are made the design and fixtures are all done etc. Once the bugs are worked out I would say the run time would drop down to an hour at the most so the cost comes down significantly.
Now of course where guitar companies get their pickguards I don't know but they are stamped out probably at about 1 per second. Or they are molded.
They probably stamp a big sheet and make alot in one shot.
Right now I am thinking of making five sets for a strat and seeing what I can get for them on ebay, the only outlay I may have for these is the clearcoating. Everything else is a company perk.
I am making a pickguard out of brass for a tele and also a back plate for it.
Of course you could stamp out the stainless steel and brass ones also but you must first build a punch and die and that is very costly. Then if you wanted engraving that would have to be an add on.
You can now trace a pickguard on paper, scan it, import it into a cadcam package but it will not be machine ready. You will have to go in and do a condsiderable amount of cleanup to get it ready for programming, then custom engraving has to be added so there is either drawing or importing more files, you can get designs machine ready but you sitll have to posistion them correctly, arrange, pick the ones out you want to begin with, it can all get very time consuming. And drawing freehand in a cadcam package is next to impossible.
You would be suprised what you can do with a thin piece of brass, a drill . some good files, sand paper,and a good dremel tool or digrinder. If you just got a piece of brass one sixteenth inch thick, traced you pickguard on it, and went at it with the tools above with some patience you could probably make a nice pickguard. Brass cuts pretty easy
