After a decade of building tele partscasters and longing for a good jaguar (but put off by the shorter scale), I finally began to slowly accumulate offset parts last summer for a Jazzmaster build. Then the idea popped in my head that so many have had before: Could I build a full scale Jag?
After some research (and a sale on Guitar Fetish on a metallic copper JM body) I decided to jump the gun and try it. This post here was the catalyst and helped me figure out a lot, so shout out to the OP. It's been a rough process, so I'm hoping publicly announcing my plans will motivate me to keep building lol, as well as gather any helpful advice offered.
After drilling the bridge post holes for a JM and making sure a JM Pickguard fits, I bought a cheap MIA Jag pickguard to see the differences and what I'd need to change. Despite the overall shape being the same, a Jaguar's neck pocket placement was lower than a Jazzmaster's so to my pleasant surprise the bridge would not have to be moved as far back as I initially thought. My plan was to move the entire pickguard down to match the body shape, move the bridge pickup down about 3/8 in, as well as make the bridge posts a rectangular notch to allow for the JM bridge placement. I bought a blank jaguar pickguard to cut the holes myself, but the gap between the neck cavity and the top of the pickguard was still too large to align all the plates with the larger GFS cavity arrangement. The swimming pool route should be easily modded to allow for the pickups, but I'll be routing out the rhythm cavity and adding some wood to install the switch plate.
One botched and modified 62 pickguard from WD Music later, I decided to go all in on designing my own. After a lot of tracing, scanning, measuring, cutting, and recutting, I eventually settled on a pickguard layout that did not elongate the original Jaguar pickguard shape/size, and kept the jag pickup distance and proportions as much as possible. It took a lot tweaks to get since all the references I pulled had different plate shapes, and i ended up having to ever-so-slightly tilt the control plate outward to match the body shape.
After a few more changes to bridge notch placement, as well as moving the pickups around a little more to fit with a 22 fret Squier neck, I cut out my final version and did a quick mock up with the pickups added in and all the plates/knobs. (Ignore the tele neck heel, it was the only rosewood neck I had lying around lol)
So there you go. I regret trying to make this a "cheap" project for my first offset build (since it hasn't really been cheap figuring everything out lol), but I'm in too deep to start over.
If it's a successful project, the pickguard should hopefully work on any JM body so I'll redo it again with a quality parts. Any feedback from true offset lifers would be appreciated, hoping this still doesn't look off and has the authentic Jaguar "vibe" when it's all together. If anyone has a good custom pickguard place who can work from a PDF that they recommend, that would also be greatly appreciated.
Telecasters are so much easier to deal with...
