Removing a Pickguard from a Taylor Acoustic

Taylor 150e, with and without pickguard

I hate Taylor pickguards. I have a 150e 12-string that sounds great, but I find no joy looking at it. I have never removed an acoustic pickguard before (but I have removed a headstock laminate), but I thought I'd look into it. It looked pretty thin, so I thought a little heat might do it.

And indeed it did. The only tool required was a hair dryer on high heat, low speed. (I should probably add the disclaimer here: do NOT use a heat gun. Assume that nothing good will come of that.)

Lifting a heated corner to check for "tan lines" before removing the whole pickguard

I held the hair dryer about two inches above the pickguard, heated one end of the pickguard and lifted it to check for tan lines, but there were none. I never leave the guitar out of the case, so the finish hasn't faded much at all. If you've had your guitar a while, you might see a noticeable difference between the finish where the pickguard was and where the rest of the finish faded.

Holding the hair dryer a couple of inches above the surface

After that, I heated the rest, slowly moving the dryer back and forth and very slowly lifting the pickguard with my other hand. Start to finish, the peeling part took about a minute or so. I was glad to see that no adhesive remained on the surface of the guitar. It was all stuck to the back of the pickguard.

Goop on the back of the pickguard

So that was a quick job, and it looks a lot better to me. I ordered a Yamaha pickguard to put on it, because I really like the looks of those. If that doesn't fit, I'll leave it as is.

Installing a Pickup and Preamp in a Yamaha FG700S Acoustic

Fig. 1. Yamaha FG700S

If this post isn't all that informative, that's at least partly because I didn't take that many photos. I was so intent on not destroying the guitar that it didn't even occur to me to take photos until after I successfully cut the first hole. But first things first.

I have an inexpensive Yamaha FG700S, which is a $200 guitar new, but I got mine used for $140. For a solid top guitar, it's hard to beat for the price, and I like this one a lot. However, shortly after buying it, I wished I had bought an acoustic electric. I put it on craigslist so I could upgrade to an acoustic electric, but got no bites. So I bought a $13 piezo pickup, and a $22 preamp and input on ebay. I didn't want to spend too much, because I felt there was a decent chance that I would destroy the guitar while trying to install the pickup, since I had never done this before. And I figured if I liked it, I could always upgrade to a better preamp and pickup.

The part I feared most, obviously, was cutting two holes in the guitar. Measuring and cutting a hole in a flat plane is easy, but the preamp goes on a curved section of the guitar. I measured the preamp housing several times, placed it along the edge of the curve in the guitar body to see where it would fit best. After finding a sweet spot, I used a razor blade to make little nicks in the finish marking the border of the section to be cut out. I then marked the border with masking tape (Fig. 2).

I drilled the corners with a 1/2" bit. I started to use a jigsaw to cut the hole, but the wood was too fragile. It made a sloppy cut. I tried a utility knife to score the border of the hole, and I kept scoring until it poked through. This didn't take as long as expected, and the cuts were pretty clean. I sanded the hole and inserted the preamp. It was a little tight here and there so I sanded it again and it fit. I didn't get photos of the preamp installation, so here is the during and after shots of the input and the after shot of the preamp:

Fig. 2. Cutting the hole for the input. Installed input and preamp.

I did the same exact thing with the input. Then I plugged the piezo pickup into the preamp and stuck it under the bridge.

Fig. 3. About to place the pickup under the bridge.

I should note that the preamp came with as under-the-saddle pickup (Fig. 4). I preferred the kind that mounts inside the guitar under the bridge (Fig. 3, above), so I snipped the input off the former and and soldered it to the latter and used that.

Fig. 4. Cheap under-the-saddle pickup

Everything's in, and although I made the input hole a hair too big (so there's not enough wood in one corner for the screw to grab), it went better than I expected.