ELECTRIC GUITAR PROJECT part 17

This guitar is gonna get finished even if it kills me! In the last episode I finally got the electronics figured out. Now I'm going to start cutting notches in the body to hold the electronics.

I traced out the size of the pickup where I wanted it in the body, and then I stepped it out a little bigger to give the pickup some wiggle room.

The screw shank is just under 7/8" long, so a 1" deep notch should work fine and give me comfortable room for wires too.

Since the body is 1 1/2" thick I have 1/2" to spare. That's good!

I put tape on my drill bits at the 1" mark so I wouldn't drill too deep. I measured from where the 1" diameter started, not the center points that extended out.

Oh oh! The center points are 1/2" long. That's bad. That means the tips of these bits will just penetrate through the back side of the body. This means I need to stop drilling a smidgen before I get to the 1" tape mark.

I tried hog-drilling this notch out in my shop on the drill press, but my tiny drill press didn't have a long enough reach. Instead I just used a hand drill back in the house, right there in the living room. I had to hurry and get all this drilling done while Mei was at work.

Here's what it looked like after I drilled out as much as I could.

The rest was cut out by hand with a flat chisel.

Tada! It ain't the most beautiful notch in the world, but none of it will be seen once the pickup's plate covers all the edges.

When I drop the pickup into the notch I have good depth, and breathing room on the sides. Even though I couldn't go the full 1" depth with this notch, the plate which holds the pickup will also have some thickness which will raise the pickup a little more. At the pickup's lowest setting I should have roughly 1/4" of space underneath for wiring. That's plenty.

Now to get rid of the evidence before Mei gets home. Trust me, you do NOT want to experience the wrath of a mad Chinese woman.

We're babysitting on the weekends. This is MeiMei. She's 2 1/2 years old. I call her Hurricane MeiMei. After a couple hours I didn't even recognize my house. She got into EEEEEVERYTHING. Every room, every door, every drawer, every toothpaste tube, every glass ornament, every button on every appliance. Every. Tiny. Little. Thing.

Days later I'm still finding evidence of her being here. My clocks were set to new individual times and my guitars were all tuned to new experimental half-half tone chords. I noticed I was getting very warm today and I looked at the thermostat and found MeiMei had fiddled with the dial until it was 10 or 15 degrees higher.
In this picture you see her playing with a potato chip bag clip. At one point I saw it clipped to my dog Lucy's ear, and Lucy was having a fit trying to get it off. When I looked back at MeiMei she was sitting watching cartoons as if nothing had happened. She's adorable though, so even when she's doing the most evil thing in the world it's difficult to say NO to her. It's like her super power.