Overarm pin router at Carmine Street Guitars

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Michael Kellough

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Just watched the documentary about this old school guitar maker and having yesterday read a thread that mentioned pin routes I thought I’d post this.

In the doc the luthier Rick Kelly is seen using a big old overarm pin router and template to contour a guitar blank.
Somewhere around a 1/4 of the way in from the start. At around 53 minutes his apprentice is using the machine without the pin as a thicknesser.

Kelly has been making electric guitars in NYC since 1976 (inspired by the Fender Telecaster) from reclaimed wood salvaged from old buildings that are being renovated or demolished.
 
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I had to Google what a pin router is.

THIS guy explains it pretty well. At 7 minutes he better describes some practical uses for it.

I kept thinking that it would not be difficult to set up my router table like that, but really, I can't think of when I had a piece like that I wanted to make.

In the original post, it mentions using it as a thicknesser, so could be that pin router was reversed, with pin at bottom and router above.
 
Steve, Google overarm pin router. The router is in the overarm and the removable pin is in the table.
They predate the router tables we use these days and are very unusual so when I saw one being used in the doc it prompted me to post.

Peter, it was a different doc simply called Carmine Street Guitars, from 2018(?).
Consisting of highlights of five days at the shop. In this one Cindy has bleached blond (or white?) hair.
 
Years ago, I toyed with the idea of adding a pin arm to my router table for template routing without bushing and calculating guide/bit offsets, etc.
Today, a CNC totally eliminates any desire from me to have a pin router.
 
There's a post here somewhere here that shows the one I made, for my router table.
A pin router's party-trick is being able to duplicate pockets on the opposite side of the project parts.
I originally built it to do dados on the opposite side of center partitions. The parts were cut on a CNC, from a full sheet, in groups. However, it can only do one side at a time. It takes very precise alignment, to turn them over, but then it's onlt one at a time. Also, with that many slots, the vacuum is diminished. Extra care is needed to constrain them, since even the slightest movement will destroy one.
It was far easier to run them on the pin router. It gets an exact duplicate of the opposite side.
Where I saw one first was in making wooden gears. It was used to make the pattern of holes and ribs, on the sides, so they resembled cast iron.
In the entire time I worked in the cabinet shop, I used it twice. Sadly, it was years apart. Once was before the fire and the other after, so I had to make it twice too.
 
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