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depends what you really want it for! There is no holy grail router as far as I'm concerned. I have 3 Routers and could probably have another 3. The least powerful is the Makita laminate trimmer used for binding and rosette work. A middle of the road Metabo router Fixed into a table. and a Big powerful 1/2 and 1/4 inch shank Trend router. All are extremely useful and I doubt they would be able to do the same job as each other as easily.
The most versatile would be the Makita but its just not powerful enough to remove alot of wood quickly
Since I dont need to remove a lot of wood fast and in general work very little with routers and a lot more with hand tools, I only have a Virutex laminate trimmer and a dremmel. The Dremel I use for routing for the rosette and for cutting the soundhole, the laminate trimmer is for bindings/purlings. And thats it...... The Makita laminate trimmer would serve me well as well.
can anyone recommend a good, multipurpose router for building guitars?
I have three Makitas of various sizes, a Bosch, a Porter Cable and an old Skill. They all work great but the Makita laminate trimmer is probably all you need. Even a Riobi is probably ok if you don't use it much. The reason for multiple routers is to dedicate them to a particular task. That way you don't have to constantly change appliances (ex. one for bindings, one for rosettes, one for bridge shaping, etc.).
I use a Bosch laminate trimmer for the rosette. You can make new soles for the router with scraps of plexiglass and then drill holes in them to make compasses out of them. Then you use some plex and wood to aq make binding/rib cutter guide. When you want to rout binding ledges you that one and when you need to do a rosette you replace it with the compass sole.
The lazy mans way to do the rosette compass is to buy two same size small drills for the hole and use one to drill the plastic and the top . The other, remove the twist part of the drill with a grinder and use the shaft as a centering pin.
You can also get a small plunge router for doing the head slots, but you need to make template guide for a top bearing straight bit, or get the router et up with template and guide bushing.
But really you can do the head slots quite fast with a sharp chisel and some practice. So really one laminate trimmer will do plenty unless you want to buy bunch and set them up as dedicated tools for each task.
There's a guitar maker her in town who is famous for his shelf full of routers.....more than a dozen, way more.
The other problem with the Bosch is that the base/sole is rectangular and larger than the Makita. I would like a smaller sole because it makes it easier to use the trimmer as a rosette cutting compass. So if I had to buy it again I would go with small circular base.
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