Guitar Router Guide: Laser Cut 1/4″ MDF

Having a guitar router guide allows you to massively increase production and/or produce a more accurate guitar, CNCROi.com can make that for you out of any material within any design parameter you may have.

For this CNCROi.com customer, they were going to use a manual hand-held router to make their guitar(s) and as a result, needed an accurate template to follow the edges to form the initial silhouette of their project.

For this guitar router guide, we used quarter inch MDF, it’s very cost-effective, it’s abundantlay available and of course, can be laser cut which is important for the little holes I had to produce within the template itself.

Router bits have a little spinning guide wheel on the top or the bottom, and what the customer needs to do with the guitar router guide made by CNCROi.com is just follow this to the edge and voila, a quick roughing outline of the item they want to make, in this case, various parts of the guitar.

If you want to get an idea of the precision we can produce, here are some 16 ga aluminium ornaments we made, but this could have been very high precision guides as well using thicker material.

MDF is great for quite a few guides in this manner, but if you wan to get into production that’s higher, or you are found in a humid environment, we can cut the same using acrylic or acetal, again, the cost is higher but you can use it that many more times as well.

The next step up after hard plastics is metals, and that’s where CNCROi.com can also help you out because we can cut he exact same guitar router guide out of aluminium (good idea to have it anodized) and mild through stainless steel, so we have you covered one unit to thousands.

CNCROi.com has a variety of CNC equipment in our shop, as a result, one design file can be used regardless of material and thus, regardless of machine that will be cutting the guitar router guide, in this case, with.

If you are wondering what a metal version of a guide would be produced and look like, above is made using mild steel, 12 ga.

I think out of all the materials CNCROi.com has cut through the years, the top one has to be MDF, it’s just such a great material for so many different applications.

Eventhough MDF is plentyful and cost-effective, I always keep offcuts from other jobs in the shop so that I don’t waste material, that’s why this piece of MDF that is becoming mutiple guitar router guides already has cuts on it, in this case, as the edges aren’t burned, was done using our CNC router.

The major advantage of laser cutting, as with plasma cutting, is that the material is never touched by the head, as such, there is no need to hold it down to make sure nothing moves as there are no forces XYZ on it, unlike a router that’s actively pushing and pulling through the material, excavating material as it goes.

The other advantage to laser cutting MDF is that the kerf is so small, unlike a router with a spinning bit, I’m really not limited by the diameter of the tool as the laser has such a small diameter.

Just to give you an idea, we can also make inlays and their related templates if you wanted it for your guitar or bass.

I really enjoy seeing the diversit of projects CNCROi.com has the honor to produce for our customers, it’s so much fun getting feedback of what was made in our shop to better their lives, whether it’s a guitar router guide that they designed and had us cut or a stainless steel vault.

The reason this guitar router guide was made in pieces was because it gives the customer a lot more flexibility regarding mix of wood and production as it’s easier to find smaller pieces of hardwood than big ones, especially when you are trying to avoid knots, holes, rot or anything else you ware trying to dodge.

You can now see this custom laser cut guitar router guide taking shape on our bed at CNCROi.com.

Whether you want a whole assembly or only a specific part, we can suit our production to your needs.

MDF is a wonderful material for a wide variety of applications because it’s relatively rigid and it’s also easy to fix-up on-site using bondo or glue if something breaks on you… and it loves paint!

If you don’t like the smoke “stains” on the edges and the surface, it can be easily sanded off, but for most of our customers, it makes no difference and personally, I like the free contrast it provides projects, it’s a nice aesthetic.

Laser cut MDF has the smell of burned wood as you can see, I’m essentially burning my way through this guitar router guide to make it out of a solid sheet at CNCROi.com.

You’ll also notice that there are lines in this guitar router guide so that the customer can line-up their work to their wood, they are faint, but they are there to help make production much easier.

Above you can see what guitar templates look like if they were CNC routere by CNCROi.com.

Once all the inside parts are cut-out, it’s time to cut the rest of the guitar router guide out.

Curves, squares, rectangles or any type of shape is easily cut accurately by CNCROi.com‘s laser.

Here’s the completed guitar router guide, now the customer can cut away and you can really see the engraving lines to help with alignment.

Need a guitar router guide? Contact CNCROi.com right now!