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Do good cheap tort pickguards exist?
- Thread starter Axstar
- Start date
Yup. I also got one of these $10 tort guards from stratosphere, and put it on a Squier P. I had to slightly widen the pickup opening, but it all lined up and fit just dandy.
To be fair I requested this level of relic as it was made to match Bobby Vega’s shark bass. Spitfire did a brilliant job and I extremely happy with it.
A guard I currently saving for a future build
Some closeups:
I like this brown tort. The photos don't show off the depth of the swirl, unfortunately... This I got off a Chinese vendor on ebay.
Some closeups:
I like this brown tort. The photos don't show off the depth of the swirl, unfortunately... This I got off a Chinese vendor on ebay.
That does look pretty good. I've never struggled to make a red pickguard look pretty on a white bass. This sunburst bass is making my head hurt a wee bit.
These are going on Ebay:
Top left is a keeper. Top right was sold to me as a celluloid pickguard, but it is quite roughly made and has a couple of weird cream spots in it. Bottom left is the dark brown tort I posted earlier in this thread. It looks too much like a Gila Monster, and made my bass look like a '70s Hondo. Bottom right is scarily close to top left, but came from a totally different vendor using different superlatives to sell a pickguard cut from the same sourced blank.
Old Fender tort looks like this:
The bevel looks less steep than 45 degrees, there is a lot of tooling chatter across the bevel, and the black layer is thinner than the two white layers. The tort effect goes through what is a thick layer of celluloid. The lighter patches don't have sharp, defined edges. The lighter patches also aren't bright yellow, cream or white. It looks like you are peering into a 3d image that has been cut through.
I don't think you need to mess around with volatile plastics to get this look, I just think that nobody beyond Spitfire is bothering to get this look right.
I bought one of the Guitar Fetish tort guards for my son’s MIM P bass. I can’t tell if it’s a photo guard or what, but it looks fine for $17, guess that’s good enough. The old celluloid ones were gorgeous, but they tended to shrink, crack, or distort. Definitely want a three ply for a P, that output jack through the guard is where they always break on a P.
I've been tempted to buy one of those metal control plates that is a copy of the lower corner of a P pickguard. The German brand 'ABM' make them and some stores call them an 'eliminator' control plate. At £51 it seems like a fair bit of scratch for a lump of metal.
My final pickguard purchase is another Ebay 'guard, coming to me from Singapore. The pictures look reasonably promising:
Again, the black layer is too thick and the sides are too white. But, the mix of colours looks soupy enough, and the yellow sections aren't too deeply defined.
I scratched the edge of one of my Ebay pickguards (bottom right) and it is a celluloid top to the pickguard. The tort layer is very thin, which is a common theme to all all four pickguards. I think celluloid, of a sort, is used more commonly than some thing. The problem is that the thin layer has no 3D imagery to it. The ugly yellow and white spots you see on these cheap pickguards comes from the more transparent areas of the thin tort layer showing the white layer underneath. By contrast the old Fender pickguards have more depth to them and things happen in the texture under the surface.
The flipside is, as you say, that these plastics are volatile and unstable.
Fender's own expensive(ish) pickguard reissues are way too dark and flat-patterned:
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Whereas a whole slew of Japanese Fender reissues came out too red:
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Next week on Axstar overthinks trivial minutia: tugbars! Why are the reissues fatter and more rounded-edged than the '60s originals?
I'm wondering if the back of the pickguard can be reinforced with a couple washers or some aluminum sheet stock? Leo's first attempt, and he stuck with it, but notice how he switched to a metal plate on the Jazz bass, must be have got an earful from early P adopters, particularly if you have a straight barrel jack that acts like a nifty lever to break the guard if you drop it! I agree, there's too red, and too brown and then there's just right....
Allparts makes a good cellulose nitrate tort guard. I’ve had a few of them over the years; they’re my go-to for a moderately priced guard that comes close to looking like the 60’s stuff. They have more of a red with yellow swirl to them. These are real cellulose with a 3D effect, not the cheap printed stuff.
I've done some experimentation, and I'm quite pleased with the results. Firstly, my Singapore pickguard arrived, and it is a printed pickguard. The finish of the pickguard was a wee bit wobbly and wayward, with plenty of router bit chatter on the bevels.
Printed! The dots give it away...
The bevel was a hot mess on it (lots of flat spots) so I spend the afternoon carving the bevel on this, and another pickguard, to give me a 60 degree bevel. This is closer to '60s Fender specs. The difference is the thick black middle layer on both pickguards and the brilliant white layers, rather than parchment. I've tried colouring the edges with oil dyes, diluted sharpie marker, but it is hard to get a perfect, consistent tint on the go.
The results look pretty promising on the bevel:
This is 'Top left' from my photo of the four pickguards (the other three went to new homes). The tort layer is thin celluloid, so it lacks the pleasing depth of the vintage Fender stuff.
The re-beveled Singapore pickguard:
Might be worth a shout. A P pickguard is £40 in the UK from Allparts. They don't have any detailed photos of the product, only a generic flat-lay of all the colours they offer. From looking at other 'vintage red tortoiseshell' Allparts guards online, they do look like the generic stuff shown in my top pickguard here.
I think there *is* some good tort material coming out of China, but you would need to buy a lot of blanks from different vendors to whittle it down.
Printed! The dots give it away...
The bevel was a hot mess on it (lots of flat spots) so I spend the afternoon carving the bevel on this, and another pickguard, to give me a 60 degree bevel. This is closer to '60s Fender specs. The difference is the thick black middle layer on both pickguards and the brilliant white layers, rather than parchment. I've tried colouring the edges with oil dyes, diluted sharpie marker, but it is hard to get a perfect, consistent tint on the go.
The results look pretty promising on the bevel:
This is 'Top left' from my photo of the four pickguards (the other three went to new homes). The tort layer is thin celluloid, so it lacks the pleasing depth of the vintage Fender stuff.
The re-beveled Singapore pickguard:
Might be worth a shout. A P pickguard is £40 in the UK from Allparts. They don't have any detailed photos of the product, only a generic flat-lay of all the colours they offer. From looking at other 'vintage red tortoiseshell' Allparts guards online, they do look like the generic stuff shown in my top pickguard here.
I think there *is* some good tort material coming out of China, but you would need to buy a lot of blanks from different vendors to whittle it down.
I'm all for that!
I don't need to be made like the old stuff, it just needs to look like the old stuff. The new stuff doesn't look like the old stuff. The distinction between 'vintage red' and 'brown' tortoiseshell seems too much like a line drawn in the sand. Fender pickguards started out brown and they turned red as they faded. A modern tort pickguard with an ultra thin red celluloid layer just doesn't look right.
I've gone too far down the rabbit hole, looking at old Fenders. My two options are to 1) give up or 2) buy a Spitfire pickguard or a vintage Fender piece. I'm saving to buy a house, so we can forget option 2!
One thing I've noticed recently is that Fender used a different tort material on the white Mustang basses:
The tort looks redder and either has a thicker black layer than P bass pickguards or is actually three ply red/white/black.
The one positive from all my analysis is that marginal-looking pickguards can be made to look better with a wider bevel on the pickguard. Old Fender pickguards seem to waver between 25 and 30 degrees (accounting for shrinkage). Modern pickguards have a shallower 45 degree bevel, and it doesn't quite 'trim' the bass the same, or looks as graceful.
The 30 degree bevel even looks good on a black three-ply pickguard:
Add the thumb rest and chrome cover and I have an acceptable 1974 look to my P bass (and it sounds good plugged in, whatever it looks like).
Thanks Dark Horse for turning me on to Fenderparts (they are on both eBay and Reverb).
I really wanted a slightly red-ish tort for a project bass. I don't care for printed tort, which seems to be the norm for <$30 budget guards (once you see the dots, you can't unsee them). I have both Warmoth and Fender cellulose guards on other basses, and they are nice but definitely low-swirl and dark brown. There's no way I could personally justify a Spitfire. Gorgeous, but yeah, that's a lot of burritos.
Fenderparts is a good middle ground. A little more than the Fender/Warmoth, but not by much. The tort layer has some honest depth (my bad phone cam photo below) and the material is heavy and substantial. The relic-ing is not too heavy-handed. You can see the individual guard you're buying so you know what you're getting for color and swirl.
I really wanted a slightly red-ish tort for a project bass. I don't care for printed tort, which seems to be the norm for <$30 budget guards (once you see the dots, you can't unsee them). I have both Warmoth and Fender cellulose guards on other basses, and they are nice but definitely low-swirl and dark brown. There's no way I could personally justify a Spitfire. Gorgeous, but yeah, that's a lot of burritos.
Fenderparts is a good middle ground. A little more than the Fender/Warmoth, but not by much. The tort layer has some honest depth (my bad phone cam photo below) and the material is heavy and substantial. The relic-ing is not too heavy-handed. You can see the individual guard you're buying so you know what you're getting for color and swirl.
