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A home-made tool for helping with the routing of binding channels |
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keith gregg's guitar-building page |
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The guitar building supplier, Steward Macdonald sells a very handy device that attaches to a Dremel tool, for cutting the rebate needed when binding the edges of a guitar. After drawing a number of designs for quite complex structures that I could make myself, I finally came up with a design much the same as that used by John Fisher, but with some modifications. |
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From previous experience with PVC tubing, I knew that heating it would make it quite rubbery, but it would set hard again on cooling. So I heated the end of a piece of 2 cm wide PVC tube until it was soft, then screwed it onto the thread of my rotary tool (not a genuine Dremel, but a cheap copy) then bound wire around it to press the PVC against the screw thread. This had the result of setting the PVC into a screw-thread shape, which could be screwed off, and back onto the tool. The picture below shows a close-up of the internal thread. |
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Three steps were required to make the device:
1. One side of the tube was cut away at the top, where the cutting blade would be.
2, Another piece from the side of the tube was heated and pushed into the top, to shape it to the upper part of the tube.
3. A third piece of tube was heated and moulded to fit around the outside of the main tube. |
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The three pieces are shown below, and the way they fit together is shown on the right. |
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The three pieces were glued together with plumbers' PVC pipe glue. |
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Fitting the adapter to the rotary tool allowed the cutter (left) to cut a channel to a specific depth, leaving just the right amount of space for the binding.
The first test of this device, on a piece of pine showed that the motor was not powerful enough to do a full-depth cut (of about 1.5 mm) without slowing down. This would have to be worse with a hardwood, so I added an extra component to the fitting. This was a collar that made the cutting depth about 0.75 mm. The construction is shown below... (sorry about the first, blurred picture) |
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When I test this on a staight piece of wood, it worked fine, but I discovered when routing the guitar body, that the cutter was held away from the wood in a concave curve. To remedy this, I had to trim the edges, as shown on the right. This fixed the problem to a large extent, but there are still places in the sharpest curves where the groove needs deepening a little |
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back to p 7 Index |
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