cutting in tele bridge pickup

imalone

This one is a physical problem rather than an electrical one:

This is my home build tele, the body is from guitar build, and its got a fender bridge on it (finding a four screw, six saddle tele bridge took a while). I'm considering changing the bridge pickup as when I first built it the coil snagged on the bridge plate and I had to wind back several kΩ of wire (actually sounds not too bad). The issues I have are:
1. It's a pain to have to take the bridge plate off to do this. Does anyone have any suggestions about doing this without removing the saddles? (On a three saddle plate they're not in the way of the screws, on the six saddle plate I haven't found a way of doing it). How many times can you remove and refit the plate before you start to make a mess of the screw holes?
2. The title of this thread. That red line marked above is where the bridge pup routing is a little too near the bridge, so getting the pickup in is extremely tight. What's the best way to deal with that without making a mess of the body? I'm wondering if it's plausible to sand back a bit.
(I've previously had to file the out the bridge pickup slot a bit on the bridge side to get the pickup through the slot in the first place. Pickup a little too large for the slot is what caused the snag incident in the first place.)

OilCityPickups

Couple of points:
Firstly remove the 'shielding' in the pickup compartment. Your bridge pickup will have a baseplate that renders the compartment shielding unnecessary ... in fact it will get in the way.

Secondly, several  'raw body' suppliers have plain got the templates wrong for their Tele routing. I make my own pickups exactly to vintage fender sizes ... but these chaps seem to use a size based on the plastic all in one bobbins you can buy. Bad news.
What pickup is it you are using? the windings should have had tape or better still string-wrap to protect them!
I've also found some cheapo flea bay Tele bridges to be far too small for proper fibre flatwork pickups ... so I'd use only quality units like Wilkinson (they don't cost the earth).
You really need to borrow a router to take the compartment forward as much as you are indicating ... if you are anywhere near London I'll 'touch' the edge of that with a 1600 watt beastie for you free of charge.

imalone

Thanks.
The bridge is actually this one from Axecaster and should be a fender part http://www.axecaster.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=12_37&products_id=121 (that wasn't really the deciding factor in getting it, more that it was the only one I could find which quite matched the requirement.
Possibly the pickup is a bit oversize. It's the Axetec steel twin, and is cloth taped, I managed to be quite clumsy and push the tape back while trying to get the fibre top through the slot. The only reason for thinking of changing it is that, after The Incident, the difference between tapped and full is less than that from the neck pickup.
The red line is just an indicator of which side/where the fit is close, nowhere near that much needs taken off: things just about fit, but it's at the point where you need to hold the plate in place while screwing it down. I think its mm or two ballpark. Thanks for the router offer, I'm in London, but this guitar lives on the other side of the Irish sea (it made sense at the time...).
Good tip on the shielding, had read that before, but wasn't sure it was completely unneeded as the sides aren't covered by the baseplate.

OilCityPickups

Seeing the baseplate I'm not surprised it won't fit! The 'non ashtray modern flat plate' ones don't fit straight on a vintage routed/screw hole body. You want a vintage style one to fit properly.

imalone

TheGuitarWeasel said:

Seeing the baseplate I'm not surprised it won't fit! The 'non ashtray modern flat plate' ones don't fit straight on a vintage routed/screw hole body. You want a vintage style one to fit properly.

I guess there's no option for a six saddle vintage-sized plate then, since this is the only one I've found that takes four screws. I'm wondering now what this is actually designed for, since most of the modern ones have three. Might look at the wilkinson compensated bridge at some point then, but probably leave it as it is for the moment, since I'm pretty happy with how it's set up right now.