Roboto Laser Designs started due to a number of reasons, but the main one is that I always get the urge to customize my instruments in some way. I'll get to how I started making pickguards later in this post but first I'd like to talk about my dear old Ibanez SA Series guitar whos picture you can see above, and how because of this guitar, I grew to love working on instruments.
This Ibanez was my first brand name guitar that I ever owned. Prior to it, I had a couple of no-name cheap guitars you could get from a pawn shop for about $20. I bought it used for about $80. While it did the job, after a few months of learning about instruments and the differences in their quality, it didn't take me long to realize the terrible condition the guitar came in. The electronics were completely rusted and had a terrible buzzing noise, the original black paint job couldn't hide the scratches and dents on the guitar, and all the hardware was dirty and/or starting to rust. So I, having no experience sanding, painting, or soldering, decided to tear down the guitar and rebuild and customize it to my liking.
Since this post is already getting too far from the topic of making custom pick guards, I'll just give some quick details on the changes I did to this guitar over the years. I swapped out most of the hardware and blocked off the floating bridge, I swapped out all the electronics and pickups which is how I learned to solder, and I ended up repainting the guitar a few times as well where I finally settled on a purple top stain and orange stain for the back and sides. There was a few other small details, but the most important is that I made some custom fluorescent orange plates for the electronics and tremolo cavities.
Now, finally getting back on topic, over the years I remember seeing solid acrylic guitars as well as acrylic pick guards on some basses (Sire V10 and Atelier Z basses) and I always thought that they looked so cool. Since my guitar didn't have a pickguard and I really wanted to include some acrylic in the build, I settled for making custom acrylic backplates. I won't go into a lot of detail, but basically the process involved a few tools, primarily a hand saw, some files, and some sandpaper. As you may have guessed from the lack of fancy power tools in my list above, yes, it was a long and terrible process, but thankfully I was happy with the end result.
This is when the idea of making acrylic pickguards came about. I was trying to find a clear transparent acrylic pickguard for my Sire V7 bass, similar to the one found on the Sire V10 basses. Long story short, I couldn't really find a reliable source for these and after seeing posts from other people saying the same, I decided to make my own since I already had experience working with acrylic. Eventually after a lot of prototypes and getting a few nicer tools, I got something I was satisfied with.
After some time, I remembered all the posts and forums I'd seen of people wanting a pickguard like mine and that's where I got the idea to start selling these pickguards. I basically had to go back to the drawing board because I now had to figure out how to drastically cut back on the time it takes to make a single pickguard, while at the same time increasing the quality of these pickguards since they needed to be something someone else would love, not something I could just say "this is fine" to. The first and most obvious step, which is not too hard to guess based off the company name, was to get myself a laser. Now while the laser is definitely a lifesaver by cutting a few hours of work down to a few minutes, it still only covers one step in the manufacturing process. It took a lot of trial and error to refine the rest of the manufacturing process (which is all by hand) to be done as efficiently as it currently is, while also increasing the quality to a level where I'm proud to share these pickguards with others.
At the time of writing this post, luckily I've reached the point where it makes sense to start selling these pickguards (with regards to manufacturing time and quality). Thankfully, in the process of refining my pickguard creation process, I managed to find other ways of putting my laser to good use by selling products locally. I guess next steps are obviously to start selling some pickguards and eventually expand into other brands and models (P and J basses, Strats, LP's, Teles, etc).