Routing Goodness...

Hello world

Over the past couple of days I began the daunting task of routing the control cavities, the pickup cavities and the neck pocket.

I began (foolishly) with the neck pocket. Really I should have done the other areas first to re-familiarise myself with the router, and then done the hardest part... Rather than vice-versa! The other 3 cavities have a margin for error, due to being covered up once the guitar is complete. Whereas the neck pocket will always be on show and needs to be perfect in order for the neck to sit properly.




I clamped the guitar to a work bench, and then clamped the template I'd previously made on top of the guitar. After the neck pocket I gave up on the template, other than using it to draw the location of the other cavities. I was confident enough in accurately routing to the lines and the template actually made it harder to see what I was doing.



I routed roughly 5mm at a time in order to minimise the amount of wood burnt by the router (the dark brown marks in the picture). The pencil line on the left is where the cutout should actually start. When the body was cut out, the template was slightly bigger than needed and more so around the cut out area to allow for final shaping and sanding.



This picture better shows the line where the cutout should start and is the completed neck pocket. On the left side near the line is where I removed the template and forgot to change the maximum depth indicator on the router to compensate. I will correct this using filler and then it won't be as noticeable with the neck on top.



This is an idea of the finished idea. It's actually starting to look like a guitar now. The final scratchplate will be black. This is just to get an idea and is taken from the guitar I got all the measurements from.



Here is a different picture showing off the guitar. Once I clamped the guitar I couldn't help myself!



A few days later I began routing the neck pickup cavity a bit at a time. As mentioned earlier there is a margin for error due to the scratchplate covering up the hole.



In this pickup you can see where I removed the excess wood before the cutout. This was done using a chisel, a hammer and the spokeshave that was used for the edging.



After the cavities were all routed, I routed a channel for the wires from the neck pickup, and then used a drill to create a diagonal hole into the bridge pickup cavity. This will all be hidden by the scratchplate.



This is the finished routing. The channel for wires from the neck pickup finishes just before the pencil line, which is where the scratchplate will come too.



Routing the bridge pickup and control cavity was quite nerveracking as the holes are 3cm deep, and the guitar is only about 4cm thick. This was a true test of the depth indicator and then I discovered that 3cm is as far as my router cuts anyway.

-L