This has been a fun one, its almost done, but I'll start at the beginning ... so the story goes ... I have a customer that we were planning a lap steel build for based off some swamp ash and a set of BG-Pups Tele A3 Rockwind bridge and Blues neck. All was fine until the project got moved up to an 8 string steel. Unfortunately 8 string Tele pickups are as rare as hens teeth and so being stubborn, and a glutton for punishment, I jumped in head first and built a set of bobbins and send them off to BG for winding.
I fired up Illustrator, drew the basics, printed them out and used them as a paper template.
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And the plot thickens, another rare item, 8 string Tele neck covers.
It was a pain in the ass, but I'm happy with how it turned out, its cobbled together out of 2 of the nickel silver covers from Mojo. There is no easy way to get a invisible butt to butt joint so I decided to embrace the seam and fancy it up just a little.
What I did was make a couple wood forms out of some scrap maple, one thicker piece to match to OD of the stock cover and one to match the ID cut to size and radiused to act as a solid form to work to. After cutting the ends off one cover and shaping the ends, I placed the center section over the large maple form and used my vice to squeeze it together to increase the ID dimension. I then took the second cover and cut sections off the ends to complete the assembly. In order to not have any doubling up of cover thickness over the magnets, the end pieces only cover the end magnet.
Once all was shaped and fit, I put a big tip on my soldering station and soldered it up followed by cleaning up the extra solder and finished off with some 800 wet / dry to give it a raw / brushed look.
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