Today, I have worked on the neck, finishing off the head end of it and mounting side dot markers (abalone).
I also routed the pickup holes and this is where things started going wrong. My idea was to have the pickups extending out of the top of the guitar as if the top itself was a pick-guard. The mounting screws would actually come in from the rear of the guitar to be invisible. I routed enough clearance (I thought) inside the body to allow the pickups to be slid in under the top and then be mounted in this way. But, it didn’t work out at all. I don’t want to carve out anything more from the rear, so instead I had to cut openings for the mounting pieces of the pickups. (Although as I’m writing this, I realize that I could have cut these pieces off altogether and replaced them with something else underneath the pickup! Ah, well – next build…)
Note that the bridge is missing parts so looks a little un-proportional. I also realized that there is not a lot of space to mount the controls. This guitar will have a single volume and a 6-way rotary pickup selector. My initial impression was that the pickup holes look OK, but if that wears off, there is still the option to mount them in mounting rings.