Pickup route templates

Because I’m still waiting on most of the parts (especially the wood!), I am going to bore you guys some more with my template stuff…

Still working on the pickguard template, sanding and filling the edges every now and then to get to the perfect shape as close as possible.

I sanded the inner sides of the neck pocket master template so that the neck template fits better. It now goes in and out well, still being tight, but not too tight anymore..

Then, onto the pickup cavity template. I screwed the first one up, but the second came out pretty okay. This is how I did it:

I made a CAD drawing of the cavities, being 1 mm wider than the pickups (equals 0.5 mm spacing around the pickups), with the centers marked of all circular shapes. Printed the drawing (and I had to scale it a few times to get it to the absolute correct size, due to the fact that my home printer has some deviation) and stuck it to some MDF.

I drilled the holes with my drill press, after marking the centers of the circles with a sharp pin, to act as a pilot hole:

Which resulted in this:

And then I used some straight piece of wood to screw to the template on all straight edges and routed the template flush with that on my router table:

Which, after some sanding, resulted in:

(What might appear to be a sloppy result at the two bottom circles, actually is some paper that tore out during drilling)

I hope I can show you some real wood dust shortly…