# Filling in empty pickup routes?



## Ancient (Sep 29, 2014)

So I've been throwing around the idea of buying an RG7321 (for the cheap price, hardtail and neck binding) and filling in the neck pickup route along with the tone control hole and the pickup selector cutout to create a single bridge pickup / single volume control beast.

So I've done body work on cars for quite a while so filling and sanding the tone control hole and pickup selector route is no issue. But I'm not sure what would be the best way to fill in the neck pickup route. I was pondering having a friend cut me out a piece of wood to fit in there, glue it in and use wood filler on the top. Then sanding it smooth and prep for painting. Not sure if this is the best plan or what type of wood and glue I should use though.

Thoughts?


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## immortalx (Sep 29, 2014)

A piece of wood with a tight fit and 2 part epoxy (for its gap filling abilities) glue should work. Don't rush and finish it right away cause it's probably going to shrink and stick out like a sore thumb! Prime it and let it sit a couple of weeks to check if the outline becomes visible.


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## Ancient (Sep 29, 2014)

Good call. 

First step is acquiring the guitar in the first place....


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## TheStig1214 (Sep 29, 2014)

You could also take the Phil X route (pun intended) and put a tiki doll in there.







Ben Weinman of TDEP Used to just gaff tape that shiz.






But seriously, as mentioned above, cut a piece of basswood to size and epoxy it in there. Only trouble is matching the finish if you aren't refinishing it.


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## Ancient (Sep 30, 2014)

Well I want to give it a custom shop look and I will be refinishing it in most likely an olive drab top with black sides and back so I'm not worried about the grain matching. Mainly worried about getting something stable in there and being able to sand it smooth.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus (Oct 4, 2014)

I've done something similar to this for my RG7321 but I wanted to swap the bridge out for one using a different hole pattern. I chose poplar because it is very similar in hardness to the wood the body is made from. I routed out a cavity where the old bridge was and filled it with some poplar first to maintain as much uniformity in the body as possible, then coated it in a few thin layers of fiberglass resin brushed on. When stripping the body I noticed the whole body had some sort of hard resin like coating so this matched quite well. Heres some pics of the process...

In this first pic the string through holes have already been filled with poplar dowel








In case you're wondering the large hole where the tone knob would've been is for an arcade
game style kill switch, like Buckethead uses 





In this next pic you can see I sanded the poplar filler piece down just slightly
below the surface of the body to make a void for the fiberglass resin to fill.

















It may not look it in the last two pictures but trust me that surface is as flat and smooth as a sheet of glass. I have not yet finished this guitar but hopefully you get the idea. This same type of process can be done to fill a pickup cavity, of course you'd probably want to paint it a solid color afterward. It is a great way to fill a cavity in a guitar body and still maintain the overall wood characteristics of the thing and not add any additional weight.


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## tommychains (Oct 6, 2014)

Ive used body filler to fill in a neck single coil route on my old Tele. It was simple and easy to do, it wasn't that bad. However, there are imperfections slightly hard to see to the untrained eye. Results vary quite a bit.

TL; DR distinguishedpapyrus has the right idea.


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## TemjinStrife (Oct 6, 2014)

Also note that the wood will shrink and expand over time differently, so it may become visible under the paint.


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## Ancient (Oct 7, 2014)

DP - Thanks so much for the tutorial!!! That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking of doing but you cleared up a few small questions I had like whether or not to resin the top. I've decided to drop the 7620 project I was gonna do this too, but I might be picking up an RG8 and converting it to single pickup / single volume and changing the bridge at which point this info will still be very very helpful.


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