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Sourcing pickguard material

3K views 15 replies 11 participants last post by  Leon 
#1 ·
I make pickguards quite a bit for customers. Particularly Charvels, because the aftermarket scene is pretty scant. Made a ton since lockdown.

It's easy to source 1ply gloss or matte black/white, 3ply B/W/B, W/B/W, tortoiseshell, all the usual crap... I'll grab a sheet here and there off eBay or Amazon or something when an order comes in.

But getting into more specific colours, and wanting to form my own custom ply combinations is absolutely fucking impossible.

Where the shitting hell would I even begin to look for the individual laminates? So few places sell them individually. And if you do a more broad search for "sheet plastics" or something, you're inundated with results for the engineering world; extruded acrylics etc, which are obscenely expensive, and rarely (if ever) come in options that are thin enough (a 3-ply pickguard is made of 3 laminates that are roughly 0.8mm~ thick)

Anybody got any experience with this shit?
 
#2 ·
I think you listed all the places I had looked when I tried a few. I may have a old buiness contact that may have a lead, I will ask and if he does I'll send you the info. My gut says what you kinda concluded, the material cost shoots up quick outside of what is the norm.

Water Wood Rectangle Flooring Table
 
#3 ·
Try searching, "celluloid sheets," or, "celluloid supplier," or similar. I was able to find a few places that seem to sell single-ply material. You may be able to drill-down that path to find what you need.
 
#6 ·
Yeah, the Alibaba route is how I'm going to have to go if I want to save money in the long run.

FWIW, for the specific guard I'm trying to make (one for myself, actually) I found an engineering plastics place that will do small sheets (350x450mm) for a great price, at 1mm in most primary colours, as well as black/white. So, the guard will come out at 3mm rather than the "standard" 2.4mm~ but hey, who's gonna notice 0.6mm, and if anything it'll be less flimsy.



There are a couple of sellers on eBay who do sheets of all the standard stuff here in the UK. Most typical 3-ply colours, as well as 1-ply black, white, and matte black. I can get two pickguards out of one sheet, but it's still not amazingly cost-effective.
 
#14 ·
Limonene will probably work "better". By better I mean it melts HIPS more efficiently, but it may be too efficiently. HIPS will get soft in acetone, but in my experience it won't flat out dissolve, at least not for a very long time or without a lot of consistent agitation. It WILL dissolve in limonene, and far faster than ABS will in acetone. That may or may not be a good thing.
 
#13 ·
No idea about acetone, but I know from my old Warhammer days that you can get polystyrene cement pretty easily - it basically melts the surfaces slightly, so I assume that would do the trick. The main issue would probably be in spreading it across an entire sheet before it starts melting it. IIRC you can get different grades of the same thing from more specialised stores, so there might be a version available that's slower to activate?
 
#16 ·
Maybe a vulcanizing press? I've had decent results gluing poly's (managed to make a rubber gasket out of 1/2" square cord on a high vacuum chamber, no leaks down to 5E-6 Torr), but a vulcanizing press might be what they use in manufacturing. It'd make the job much faster, less messy, and much flatter overall, I think.
 
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