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I am in the process of building a couple of telecasters, I generally build acoustics, and wanted to understand how to go about routing the perimeter of the body with a hand router. I also have a table router as well. I want to avoid blowing out the bouts and horn. There is pattern to trimming the back and top overhang on an acoustic guitar, is there one for solid body electrics?

Thanks in advance.

I don't think there is a pattern for Tele styles that I've seen Patrick. But what I would do is take the acoustic pattern, I used to do this when I was building and tape it to the wall over my binding router jig and duplicate the direction on the pattern. For say the inside of the horn I would approach it as if it's the other side of the instrument as per the pattern.

I might be inclined to draw a Tele shape and then highlight my cuts and add a directional arrow.

Climb cuts, what we call this are cheap insurance against an expensive accident so good going for thinking of this.

Climb cuts can also grab the workpiece and launch it across a room so you have to be really careful about that. The main thing is to take very shallow cuts of no more than 1/8" deep and make multiple passes. I find that a router table is safer because it allows you to have both hands on the workpiece and you don't have to worry about the router tipping.

In regards to direction of cut, I like to envision the direction of the rotation of the spinning bit and then look carefully at the work piece and determine where the bit might catch the grain and pull out a chunk. Those are the areas that you should reverse the direction of cut. Take a pencil and place arrows on the guitar body to show the proper direction for each section.

Another consideration is the router itself. A router with a 1/2" diameter collet will be MUCH more stable and you will get a smoother cut compared to a 1/4" collet.

Using Bill Cory’s diagram, I transferred it to the telecaster shape. Any thing I missed? I think I will do this on the router table so I have two hands on the piece. Sorry for the blurry image, Apple doesn’t make it easy to resize images without a third party app.

Looks good.
Just note that the router bit in a hand-held rotates the opposite direction when it is mounted in a table router.
Hope that makes sense.

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I see no mention of just exactly how you plan to do this routing...I'll assume you're going to have a template attached to your wood, which begs the question is said patter sized for the use of a collar on your router or is it made for the use of a flush cut bit?

Either way I'd suggest attaching the pattern then using it as a guide to carefully use a jigsaw or bandsaw to get real close to the pattern so as to not be taking off too much material at once which will be beneficial in numerous ways not the least of which being able to control a hand held router much better.

I'd definitely prefer a 1/2" shank router bit...

I have a template attached to the body blank and plan to use a 1/2” shank pattern bit to trim the perimeter.

Edit: using the diagram from Bill Cory’s book did the trick to successfully rout the perimeter of the tele body without blowing anything out.

It's also all about baby steps. Be sure and cut off excess with band saw. And then take only a little bit at a time with flush cutter.

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