Stainless Steel Scratchplates?

[moleck]

Hey guys,


after seeing this site and talkin with my old man (his buddy owns a metal works) I've decided I'm goin to get a stainless steel scratchplate made up.

First question: What about magnetism? That site says that 304 grade isnt magnetic, but my old man says it is...would this cause problems with the pickups?

secondly, does anyone know of a place to get an accurate CAD drawing of the scratch plate? looked around but I can't, surprising considering how popular a guitar the strat is. This is a quick photoshop job of what I want it to look like



Cheers

Tom

[Offshore Angler]

300 series stainless steels are non-magnetic. There is an effect were 300 series austenitic steels that have been cold worked can develop a magnetic response, but I doubt you'll be getting into that making a pickguard. The sheet was most likely hot-rolled at the mill.

400 series are magnetic, and much more prone to corrosion.

Chances are, if you use a 300 series it will still get corrosion from your hands over time. For corrosive enviorns (such as NAVY aircraft) it is standard to flash nickel electroplate the 300 series and then do an electroless teflon infused nickel plate over the flash.

But hey, what do I know?

[Offshore Angler]

As far as the CAD drawing, a shop with the CNC machinery to make the plate will most likely have a CMM device to measure it and create a vector model, so a CAD drawing would be easy.

[curtisstetka]

Uh, yeah. I was gonna say that too. OA just beat me to it.

[Tonefiend]

That would be a pricey pickguard!

Another way would be as follows.

Get a raster to vector program like Adobe Streamline. Trace a guard then scan in in. Do the conversion. Now you have a DXF or DWG. Pull that into your drawing program to clean up the geometry and you are good to go.

You'll have to reverse engineer the whole thing, but a few minutes with a calipers and some drawing is all it will take.

[Kap'n]

Sounds really heavy to me.