Why Did a Little Pickguard Shop End Up Building Its Own Software?

We never set out to be a software company. We cut and print custom pickguards in a small workshop, and most days that is more than enough to keep us busy.

But a few years ago we ran into a problem that would not go away.

The problem: great guitars with no drawings

Customers kept bringing us guitars that nobody makes pickguards for anymore. Pawn-shop finds, short-run imports, oddball vintage models. An original pickguard gives you something to work from — but only if you can turn that physical outline into an accurate digital cutting file.

So we went looking for a tool that could trace a photo of a part and give us a clean, dimensionally correct outline.

The only answer cost thousands of dollars

The software that could do what we needed was built for big manufacturers, and it was priced that way. For a small shop like ours, spending thousands of dollars on a tracing tool just was not realistic.

So we did what small shops have always done when the tool they need does not exist: we built it ourselves.

Late nights, wrong turns, and a working tool

There was a lot of learning along the way — more than we expected. But eventually we had something that worked: photograph a part, trace its outline, and get a usable cutting file without the industrial price tag.

That tool became PartSketcher. It grew out of a real need on our own workbench, and now we share it with other makers, restorers, and small shops who have something to build and need a practical place to start. You can take a look at PartSketcher.

What it means for your pickguard

Building our own tracing software changed how we work every single day:

• Odd and rare guitars are welcome. If you have the original pickguard, we can almost always make a replacement.
• Fit is verified before we cut. Your outline is checked against real measurements, not guessed.
• Small shops can do big-shop work. The same process that traces a vintage guard also checks every standard template we cut.

Two websites, the same small-business roots — and a lot of ideas still waiting to take shape.

If you have a guitar nobody seems to have a drawing for, that is exactly the kind of job we built this for. Start a custom build and send us what you have — we will take it from there.