I set the neck and fretboard up, and added the pickup ring to check where it would go. I've got a pair of 'ebay special' humbuckers I keep in the workshop for placement and measuring for these situations:
The pickups will be routed at the neck angle. I placed the router template on the part of the body which has the neck angle plane on it. This was supported at the other end by placing a couple of offcuts between it and the body.
Here's the neck pickup after a couple of shallow passes with the router:
And as the depth increases, we break through the maple top into the mahogany - here we can see the copper foil which we used earlier to shield the channel between the switch cavity and control cavity.
I found a lot of sources about how deep these should be on a '59. They all seemed to be just over an inch deep. I routed the main part of the pickup to 27mm.
To rout the 'ears' of the pickup, I set the router up with a fence. This meant that between the fence and the follower bearing, the router would be trapped so that it could only move in the 'ear' section of the pickup template. I routed the ears to 37mm.
Here's the pickup with the template still attached:
I did similar for the bridge pickup, and sat the pickups and rings in place:
Here's the view of the neck pickup rout. The tenon from the neck needs to be cut off, as it's currently too long, protuding into the rout:
The next logical step is to start with the body carve. I marked with a pencil the sections of the body the parts that I don't want to sand - the top (for now) and the bottom 'layer', which will eventually have a bit of a recurve on it and will remain flat until then:
I attacked the body with sandpaper, and the robosander (mounted in my hand drill):
Maple is pretty hard and takes a lot of work to sand. I could use bladed tools like spokeshaves, thumb planes or gouges, but I am happy to take this slowly and sandpaper will also be significantly lower risk:
I'll get this a little closer to the final shape, at which point the binding will go on.
