Finishing the Templates (Finally)

Well, I figure it's a bout time I get it over w/ and finish up these templates, given that there's not much else to do until I'm done w/ them. All I have left is to make the holes to rout out the pickup and control cavities. The process is super simple. Do the rough cut w/ a jigsaw (drilling holes first so you can get started and turn the blade at corners) and file away until you are really, really, really bored of filing/

Cut w/ the jigsaw (notice the corner holes):



And you wind up w/ something like this and a lot of filing to do:



These files are actually pretty cool. They used to be my grandfather's so I guess you can call them heirlooms. Either way, they work rather well but slowly especially on my thick sheet of MDF:


It took me a hell of a long time to get them reasonably square. It sucked but it beats the hell out of not building your own guitars so there you go. Here's how it ended up:


The pickup slots are about exactly the size of the pickups. Of course, they need to be a bit wider than that so I'm going to set up my router in such a way that it adds an extra sixteenth or an eighth of an inch around the edges. Hopefully, that will do the trick. I will be damned if I do any more filing on this template.