Making Routing Holes for an Electric Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Frank Pope, FBI Guitars. I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to give you some tips on how to build your own guitar. I'm going to talk to you about how to route out the interior pockets of the guitar. One of the things that you'll need to do, is to get very comfortable using this router. You want the ball bearing, when you set it, to be just below this housing so that it will catch the template, which you will attach with double sided tape to the body. You must make sure that this is firmly attached to the wood because if it slides while you're using the router, then it's going to mess up. Once it's secure, I recommend that you use a drill to drill out as much of the portion that's going to be routed as you can. That will save your router. It can quite stressful and tense running a router. It's very loud, it's very sharp, it's very fast. It's a thing that you can hurt yourself with if you don't pay attention. If you drill most of it out, then you'll put the router in. Make sure the ball bearing is hitting the template, otherwise you'll just be free cutting. Then you'll just move it around the interior of the cut-out and you'll have a perfectly rounded slot. One of the things you'll need to do is know how deep each cut is going to be before you put the router in there. So, make sure you have that double checked before you stick the router in. "