Why hasn't someone come up with a new tortoise shell analog

[Singlebladepickup]

Do the dirty poor! Sounds like a dance made up by whitey, but that picture looks awesome

[tdbajus]

I've been pondering this for quite a while now and I think there are two main options for a cool "tort-y" pickguard.

The first one would be epoxy. Deel_poll has been making these and they look the part:

Holy shit, that looks amazing too.

Is the top layer translucent, like tort? It really looks like it.

[leokula]

Those guitar 'skin' shops and Spitfire's existence show there is a market for 'new tort', but probably a sub-niche inside the already niche tort set.

Those are my thoughts exactly. Whoever posts in this forum can consider themselves already inside a small group of people inside the big market of guitars. And then inside this very same forum, a lot of people are fine with cheap tort, so you can see how small, despite its existance, is the market for, let's call it vintage tort or true cellulose tort.

[Deed_Poll]

I've been pondering this for quite a while now and I think there are two main options for a cool "tort-y" pickguard.

The first one would be epoxy. Deel_poll has been making these and they look the part:

Holy shit, that looks amazing too.

Is the top layer translucent, like tort? It really looks like it.

Cheers!

So yeah I'll explain these guards.

Yes the top layer is translucent, the colour is excellent, rich and deep.

I was supplying a local artist (who works with epoxy) with standard vinyl 3-ply material in large size (290mm x 430mm?) which is a nice parchment colour and came up a bit thinner than most (2.3mm thick instead of up to 2.8mm for other 3-ply materials).

I removed the plastic cover and roughed up the top with some 400 grit so the epoxy would have something to grip onto.

There were some problems though. First, although the top surface was shiny, it wasn't very even and sometimes had tiny bubble holes in it, so I would have to then flatten it down on my CNC. Much of the time it would be deeper in some places than others, and the layers of colour would show up inconsistent after this step. Sometimes it wasn't so bad like on the guard above; but sometimes to get the whole sheet flat it would go right the way through the red and dark brown colouring pretty much to plain amber. Sometimes the red had been applied on top, as I was left with a greeny / amber mush (brown dye tends to go that way) which wasn't very pretty either. A couple of them worked really nicely.

After that, I had trouble polishing them right back to a reflective glassy gloss finish. It was possible but very labour intensive on top of the fairly high price of having the epoxy work done (artist rates, I don't begrudge that!) and the extra time on the machine flatting it off, and even then sometimes it went through too much colour that it wasn't usable at the end of it.

The artist moved on to other things and lost interest in the project, but I got myself some of the epoxy and dyes to practice myself and I'm aiming to try again, maybe this time using a slightly different process that involves clamping down a flat sheet of polished glass to make sure it sets perfectly flat and shiny. That might work, or might not. But I haven't put much time into it lately because I've been quite busy with other things!

I will pick it up again though if the demand is there, having it all in-house and developing a bulletproof jig / system to minimise flattening, polishing and undue variance in colour I think I could make it work at a reasonable price. But it will be a fair amount of work to get it to that point and supply will always be quite limited.

Hope that clears up any queries!

[blimpage]

That's awesome, thanks for the insight! I was wondering if you were still working on those.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't really like my pickguards to be super perfectly shiny (it just makes it more obvious when I inevitably scratch them up!). I'd totally pay for one that's more matte, and wouldn't be bothered if it's a little uneven.

[s_mcsleazy]

Pen nerds are way ahead on their plastics game.

https://www.exoticblanks.com/Rhino-Plastic-Pen-Blanks/

i can see at least 10 pickguards i would like to see.

[Deed_Poll]

Agreed, Sleazy. But it's a big problem I've come up against when trying to source tort and other attractive alternatives (and I've done so quite a lot in search of a decent red tortoise). And that is the size of the blanks. A lot of stuff is available in pen size, or turning sized blocks. But it's really difficult to find something in sheet material the size of a Jazzmaster guard.

I thought I'd got lucky at one point finding a block of double dyed stabilised figured maple, but it was just too small and I had no idea how to slice bits off of it... But I'd love to try that sometime as well.

This is what it looks like in pen blank form:

[danbind]

Hmmmm...those pen blanks are obviously cut from a larger piece. Those distributors (Woodcraft in the US) gets them from somewhere. That would be who I called first.

[Deed_Poll]

Hmmmm...those pen blanks are obviously cut from a larger piece. Those distributors (Woodcraft in the US) gets them from somewhere. That would be who I called first.

Yeah I've been through all that, right back to the guys working on the logs. I tried to get hold of a huge chunk double dyed red / amber. It was going to cost several thousand dollars and they couldn't promise there wouldn't be cavities deep in the chunk, smaller pieces it's not a huge problem because they can fill them in with dyed resin and that looks quite nice as well (look up 'hybrid blanks').

Besides which I don't have a machine that would reliably cut 1mm thick slices off it, and even if I did, it would probably waste 2mm-3mm of material for each sheet when flattened and polished.

It was just looking way too high risk to be throwing into at that price with all those things that could go wrong! Even things like: what if the colour comes out slightly pink, or just not what I was after such that it doesn't look like tort? The acceptable bounds of tortoiseshell plastic as a material are so narrow in many ways (like sunbursts) and everyone has such particular tastes that I couldn't justify taking it on at that time.

They do look spectacular though.

[Debaser]

Cheers!

So yeah I'll explain these guards.

Yes the top layer is translucent, the colour is excellent, rich and deep.

I was supplying a local artist (who works with epoxy) with standard vinyl 3-ply material in large size (290mm x 430mm?) which is a nice parchment colour and came up a bit thinner than most (2.3mm thick instead of up to 2.8mm for other 3-ply materials).

I removed the plastic cover and roughed up the top with some 400 grit so the epoxy would have something to grip onto.

There were some problems though. First, although the top surface was shiny, it wasn't very even and sometimes had tiny bubble holes in it, so I would have to then flatten it down on my CNC. Much of the time it would be deeper in some places than others, and the layers of colour would show up inconsistent after this step. Sometimes it wasn't so bad like on the guard above; but sometimes to get the whole sheet flat it would go right the way through the red and dark brown colouring pretty much to plain amber. Sometimes the red had been applied on top, as I was left with a greeny / amber mush (brown dye tends to go that way) which wasn't very pretty either. A couple of them worked really nicely.

After that, I had trouble polishing them right back to a reflective glassy gloss finish. It was possible but very labour intensive on top of the fairly high price of having the epoxy work done (artist rates, I don't begrudge that!) and the extra time on the machine flatting it off, and even then sometimes it went through too much colour that it wasn't usable at the end of it.

The artist moved on to other things and lost interest in the project, but I got myself some of the epoxy and dyes to practice myself and I'm aiming to try again, maybe this time using a slightly different process that involves clamping down a flat sheet of polished glass to make sure it sets perfectly flat and shiny. That might work, or might not. But I haven't put much time into it lately because I've been quite busy with other things!

I will pick it up again though if the demand is there, having it all in-house and developing a bulletproof jig / system to minimise flattening, polishing and undue variance in colour I think I could make it work at a reasonable price. But it will be a fair amount of work to get it to that point and supply will always be quite limited.

Hope that clears up any queries!

I like what you did here, and thanks for the insight on the process and the supplier limitations. Count me in this sub-niche but I’m also pretty tame as far as tort or pearloid goes, and only a few of those pen blanks look good to me.