This post touches on a guitar repair job currently on my bench, but is really more about a cool online resource I found for custom pickguards for acoustic guitars.
So I’m doing some repairs to a nice old Taylor guitar for a buddy this week. The guitar suffered from:
- Some slightly worn frets (some sandpaper and a good polishing/conditioning took care of that)
- And a bridge pulling up off the top (which required removing the bridge, cleaning everything of old glue, applying hide glue to both clean wood surfaces, precise positioning of the bridge to the top and clamping the hell out of the entire thing).
In addition, the original pickguard, as sometimes happens, was curling up around the edges. While not a structural issue necessarily, a curling pickguard will gather dirt, possibly interfere with one’s picking technique, and is just an annoyance all around. There’s basically three remedies for this:
- Carefully remove the old pickguard with a hot iron, flatten it out by soaking in hot water, scrape off any residual glue from both surfaces, and reattach the old pickguard using adhesive, or
- Carefully remove the old pickguard with a hot iron, flatten it out by soaking in hot water, use it as a template for cutting a new pickguard out of a big rectangular piece of pickguard material, and attaching to the guitar with the aforementioned adhesive, or
- Carefully remove the old pickguard with a hot iron, throw it in the trash, and install a properly-sized, commercially-available replacement pickguard.
Upon consulting with my buddy, we’re opting for the third option. Which brought up the matter of sourcing a new replacement pickguard for a Taylor acoustic. Taylor uses a very limited number of pickguard designs, so finding a replacement isn’t too difficult.
But in the course of my search, I ran across AcousticPickguards.com (a sister site of AxetremeCreations.com). They offer not just standard replacement pickguards, but also custom designs for the player who’d like to snazzy up his/her instrument with a unique look. In fact, this company will even take images you upload and emblazon them on a pickguard for a reasonable price.
My buddy opted for what’s called “Flowers & Flames”, a dramatic design indeed:
The finished product
