I just finished routing the binding ledges on my newest build – a tenor ukulele in cedar and walnut with venetian style cutaway. I’ve never been very pleased with the results using the stewmac router base with their little brass edge guide thingy. I use too much radius, especially on the back, to get an even result with that setup. So I got some rebate bits for my dremel and made myself a simple router table.

Why shouldn’t you do this at home? The router bit sticks up above the table and that’s where your hands are, moving the piece of wood. So if anything went wrong, your hand could get pulled into the moving router bit and get torn to pieces. That’s why there is normally some kind of safeguard on router tables that work like this. But since I want to approach the bit from all angles with a large piece of material (the body of a guitar or ukulele), there is no way for me to put any safety mechanism on it to protect my hands. That’s why I’m the only one who’s allowed to do it, so no one can get hurt but me, the lunatic that made it.

Here are a few pictures of how the binding ledges turned out using a 1.5 mm rebate with the bit set to about 3.5 mm height.