June 10, 2010

A lot of time this week has been spent on the building of a router table.  I have a router table that sat in my garage (the room for all my power tools) and was made of MDF which sat directly under the largest leak in the garage.  Needless to say, there are several leaks in my garage (circa 1910, cracked concrete, mostly below ground level).  All sorts of effort has been made to stop the leaks, but none successfully.  I’ve resigned myself to draping plastic garbage bags over all my power tools.  The MDF router table was unusable as it bulged from all the absorbed water over the past year.  I used it as a template and constructed a new one out of 3/4″ birch ply finished with lacquer.

I’ve been aware for some time that a router table with certain jigs is used quite a bit in luthier’s shops.  The first use is to radius bracing.  By building a jig that holds the brace blanks and has interchangeable radius templates, one can quickly and accurately radius braces and tonebars.  I’ve designed the jig, but haven’t constructed as of yet.  My design will allow for any width of brace and any radius that I have a template for (right now I have 40, 28, 20, 15, and 12).  I use 28 for the top and 15 for the back on my current guitar models.

I’ll post a few pics of the router table and jig once complete.