Making a Cover Plate

Making a cover plate for the tremolo spring cavity for the Fernandes ‘Sustainer’ guitar was fairly easy, since it didn’t have to fit flush into a routed recess, but actually sits out on the back surface of the guitar body.

Steps for Making a Cover Plate

1. First, I took careful measurements of the screw holes, center-to-center, and made a little sketch with those dimensions.
2. Then I added 5 mm outside of the screw hole pattern, for the edge of the plate.
3. I put a solid layer of masking tape onto the piece of material, large enough to encompass the size of the plate, using one straight edge of the material as my ‘reference’ and as one edge of the plate.
4. Then, I transferred the sketch & dimensions onto the masking tape using some of my old drafting tools from bygone days.
5. Once I had the outline of the plate and the hole centers laid out, I scored the material along the outlines with a sharp X-Acto knife, and simply snapped it off.
6. The material Scott gave me to make the plate from was pretty thin, so it was easy to break it off on those scored lines.
7. Then I used my drill press to drill and countersink the six screw holes before rounding off the corners and dressing all the sharp edges down.
8. All that was left to do at that point was to remove the masking tape and make a final check for sharp edges.

Done!

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