getting outfitted 3

Last night, I had some time to get down to the shop and work a little bit. My first order of business was assembling my new router table.

My birthday was in November, and my lovely wife got me a Bench Dog ProTop router table as a gift.

A router table is important in guitar building, because it allows the builder, when routing, to move the work, not the router. You mount the router, bit towards heaven, to the underside of that white table top, and the router bit sticks through that big hole in the center of the grey plate. As the bit spins, the builder moves the wood into the bit.

Some folks say the benefit of a router table is that if the bit and the wood hook up, the part that goes flying is the wood --- and more importantly, not the router, with it's 20,000+ RPM razor sharp cutter.

In general, it's always a good idea to bolt down the most dangerous piece of equipment, in pretty much all areas of life. So instead of clamping the wood to a table and moving the router over it, I've decided to bolt the router to a very heavy cabinet table like this, and move the wood over it.

Also, I found a remarkably helpful series of YouTube videos this week, illustrating in video the steps that home guitar builder takes to get a guitar body from body blank to Tele plank. Huge thanks to YouTube user customd28.

This video will give you a great idea of how I will use my router and router table to shape the guitar body.





Until next time,
Hunter