Pickguard bevelling?! Help

[AndyTravis]

Hi.

in the midst of sorting a new bass and a Pickguard to fit it.

I’ve hopefully secured a suitable Pickguard but it doesn’t appear to have a bevelled edge (Fender style) and is just cut at a 90 degree flat edge.

has anyone got the tooling or skill to do this to an existing plate or is it an intrinsic part of the raw cut?

I know @TimAl has flat edges on his Pickguards, and for stuff he’s done for me previously that’s worked perfectly.

But for this I want the b/w/b to show through.

[gary mac]

I was planning on doing this very job a while back, in the end I had a change of mind. At the time I found this and thought that it was pretty good info: 

http://www.offsetguitars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=101316

 

 

[Maude]

I was going to say use a Stanley or single sided razor blade but hadn't thought of making a little jig to hold it in, really liking that idea. 

[Beer of the Bass]

I did one freehand with a craft knife, and it's pretty scruffy looking up close.  So the jig looks like a good idea!

[AndyTravis]

Cheers. Just hanging fire as buying the Pickguard for the bass is taking 4/5 more days than buying the bass took.

im sure he’s just busy, so I’ll remain chilled 😉

[DaveFry]

The blade in an old fashioned pencil sharpener ( the kind where you turn the pencil , not the ones with a crank handle ) have a locating hole for the screw ready made .
I would try modifying one of the plastic pencil sharpeners with a junior hacksaw and araldite .
HTH

[Bassassin]

I've struggled with this. I'm pretty handy cutting out accurate shapes for scratchplates, but always get to the point where I don't want to potentially wreck the hours spent doing a tidy job by bodging the edges. I tend to round off & polish a straight-cut edge, which sort of allows the layers to be visible - but not as well as a proper bevel would:

Liking the look of the Stanley knife blade on-a-stick tool, think I'll knock one of those up and get practicing on a bit of scrap.

[Manton Customs]

If you’ve yet to buy the pick guard it might be easier to buy a blank sheet of pg material and take that to a luthier (no I’m not after work!) with a tracing or the old guard. It’s perfectly possible to bevel it after by hand though, it’d just be a bit easier the other way round.

The way a luthier would do it would be to use a router and template. The template is attached to the sheet of pick guard material, the sheet rough cut, then routed flush using a bearing guided cutter. Then with the template still attached but using a different cutter in the router the bevel is cut. This is accurate as everything is already lined up where it should be and fast as it’s just a quick whizz round with the router to cut the bevel. Making a template for an existing pick guard and using the same router method would be a bit of a pain as any tiny discrepancies between template and PG would be obvious in the bevel.

So that would be two options...start from scratch or bevel by hand. If you bevel by hand you’ll find it quicker to use a file to rough it in then a scraper to clean it up. 

Ps the jig looks cool too 😎