I ordered a Les Paul type bracket through Amazon, but it turned out to be coming from Shanghai and it got stuck in customs in L.A.

The big archtop bracket would probably work if the second bend were flattened out, but these have two screw holes to attach to the body, so I would have to drill another hole in the guitar.

The Gibson style would work for a Casino, but I already had a pickguard with a screw hole in it. The pickguard brackets that are generally available fall into three categories: generic Les Paul type, generic big archtop (these have a double bend), and Gibson ES-335 style, which is fancier and requires that you glue the pickguard onto a plastic block. Now I needed the mounting bracket, which was also a search. I finally found an ad on Ebay for a pickguard made for a 2007 Casino, from a source recommended in internet discussions, C-Rocker Guitars. According to the serial number, my guitar is Chinese, made in 2006. A lot of places that custom make pickguards want the buyer to send a tracing of the old pickguard, but I didn’t have one. The PickguardĬasinos have changed over the years and have been made in different factories in different countries. In fact, the whole process was a journey, which I will recount here for anyone else who goes down this path. It turned out that finding a pickguard that would fit was a bit tough. The other reason was that I thought a cherry red guitar would look awesome with black pickups, black top hat knobs, and a black 5-ply pickguard. I ended up putting my finger on the bridge pickup, which was a bit far back. However, without a pickguard, the body of the guitar was a long way down.

I am a little sloppy finger picking, and this helps tighten things up. One, when I finger pick I tend to anchor my hand on my little finger. I wanted mine to have one, for two reasons. A lot of people take them off and then they get lost.

Epiphone casino pickguard screws