Luthiery Laboratories

Laying out for the angled double lipstick bracket. The straight one is at the left, in the center I have cut out my drawing and Scotch-taped it to the aluminum blank. Then I punched the centers through the paper. That's what the black tool is - a spring-loaded punch. It is used to make dimples in material to accurately start a hole. If you don't have one of these in your toolbox, get one - under ten bucks. It works great on woods and soft metals, and even mild steel. The accuracy of your drilling will improve tremendously.

Here is the finished product. A sharp eye will notice there are two sets of mounting holes. The first set I made is on the centerline. That just didn't look right, so I made a second set offset to be equidistant from the ends of the tubes. That is much more pleasing to the eye. But it's hard to judge with the mounting plate showing.

Yes, that looks right. This is a paper cutout I made to see how it would look installed. I will fill in the first set of holes to avoid mistakes. This time I had no trouble threading all four holes. The trick is you must oil the hole, and frequently back out the screw and re-start it, whenever it feels like it is binding. Also, you need a pointy screw, the Fender-style screws I have are blunt, so I fished around and found something with the same thread.

This would probably be much easier to make in brass. But brass would be more expensive and harder to get, while Home Depot sells this aluminum material. Actually, they both look pretty pricey online.

Now I have to make a template for this thing. I think I'll make one first out of masonite. When that is good, I can transfer the shape to a piece of acrylic. A template for a template, but I'm down to my last three pieces of clear, and I would hate to waste one on a screw-up. I actually just ordered a humbucker template, as I want to save my time and materials for oddball things like this.

Here is the pre-template, made from a nice soft easy-working tone-scrap. Lipstick pickups are not quite round on the ends, they're slightly flattened. A 5/8" Forstner bit will give you a good start:

1. draw your outline
2. drill 4x 5/8" holes inside your outline
3. connect the holes with a saw, cutting inside your outline
4. file the sides straight and even until the width just fits the pickup
5. work one end of the opening until it fits the end of the pickup
6. work the other end of the opening until the pickup fits entirely
7. work the entire edge to get a nice even gap

I did the job with a half-round file and a 1/2" sanding drum on the drill press. Straights are done with the file, curves are done with the drum. When you get close to finished, you can use the drum in your hand as a file.

This pre-template is pretty good. Next, I'll trace it onto a piece of polycarbonate and do it all over again. Except this time I will have the shape already; no experiments with the good material. I started making a second slanted mounting plate. I'm not completely happy with the first one. It is good enough to use, but not to use as a model. Hopefully, the second one will come out better, and I will keep it for a template.

This is really two different mountings, as you can flip the parts and the template and slant the pickups the other way. That gives me six options for lipsticks: single/double x straight/forward/backward.

Big Ricky's pickups just arrived. Mini humbuckers, I already have a template for those, but I need to modify it from a pickguard rout to a body rout with a mounting ring. That means widening it up a bit and making room for the ears - easy. Little Ricky's pickups are midi-sized, longer, and wider. Guitar humbuckers are even bigger, but with the three templates, I should have every kind covered.

This time I nailed it - symmetrical to within a few thousandths, pretty good for handwork. I need to cut the threads and temporarily assemble it so I can fit the routing template around it, then this one will go in the template box along with the straight one.