The Pickguard
We ended up ordering some nice pickguard stock on eBay from a company in China before we started this project. It arrived fairly promptly, and the quality seemed good. We drew the pattern on the backside of the pickguard stock, and cut it out with the jig saw. A jig and a router would probably produced a cleaner piece, but after some filing and sanding of the edges, they looked fairly good. We used the drill press and a Forester bit to drill the holes for the controls. Once the pickguard was shaped, we temporarily attached it to the guitar with a couple of screws, and used it to locate the bridge riser. Before glueing the riser, we first drilled a hole at an angle from beneath the riser over to the control cavity. We don't have a picture of this, but basically, we drilled a shallow 3/8" hole in the top of the body, and then used a 3/16" long aircraft bit to drill from there to the control cavity at a shallow angle. We then drilled a small hole in the risor that lined up with the bigger hole in the body, all of this being located under the tail piece. The ground wire comes up under the tail piece, and the end is striped and tinned. The tail piece simply clamps down on top of the tinned wire end, and makes contact with it. You should be able to see this hole in some later pictures...
Glueing the bridge riser
Mock up with bridge riser, pickguard and neck
Next, we needed to make a plate for the output jack. We picked this trick up on someone's blog who was also building a lap steel guitar. Pretty clever. We bought two stainless steel rulers that already had a hole in one end so they could be hung on a hook. The ruler was exactly the correct width, and a 1/4" phone jack fit in the existing hole perfectly! We cut off the end of the ruler, sanded the edges and corners, drilled four holes for screws, and we had our output jack plates!
Output jack plate from ruler
Output jack plate mounted on guitar
Once the pickguard and output jack plate were built, we were ready to glue the fretboard to the body, being careful to get it lined up with the bridge riser.
Glueing the fretboard to the body
Yet another Mock Up!
The pickguard still needs to be wired up, but since the finishing of the body is going to take several coats, we tackled that next.