Best material for templates?

Hi guys!

Next week i'm gonna route some templates. I see that most of you have templates made of MDF. Now routing MDF is a pretty dusty job.
What are the pros and cons of alternative materials like plywood or chipboard?

There's no voids in mdf and it's very easy to sand, doesn't chip, easy to route and is very stable. Plywood you might have to do some filling to get the edges smooth unless you use a good grade. Chipboard well, chips and splinters and isnt very strong or stable.

I prefer MDF templates. It's dusty to work with but thats what dust masks are for. :wink:

Baltic birch does well for templates. The cheaper plywoods splinter, have voids and occasionally delaminate on me.

Wanted to use plexiglass but have heard horror stories of stuck bearings on router bits melting it. So mdf it continues to be!

I like to use polycarbonate, (Lexan) because you can scrape it and buff it to a high gloss edge.

Your router work is only as good as your templates. Making great templates that are extremely smooth takes alot of the work out of sanding the surface later.

Polycarbonate is also very strong and will not crack if dropped on the floor. The only thing you need to be careful of is chemicals. Any solvents or oil based fluids will eat through polycarbonate pretty quickly.

As for "stuck bearings" melting it? I tend to use router bits without bearings and a non-rotating collar on the router base as my guide.

I like 1/4" poplar ply templates. They are cheap and easy to fix with plastic wood or epoxy when dinged up by the router. Poplar is fairly hard, available at home centers, and cheaper than birch or oak. The secret is to run 2 bearings on the shank. When one fails, you have the other as a backup. They do fail too. I can't tell you how many melted plastic Stewmac ones were tossed out over the years and they ain't cheap.

I have both MDF and chipboard templates. Both of which cost me nothing. I ran out of MDF so thought I would use the chip board. It seems to work just fine my chipboard is white melamine coated so very flat and very stable. The edges don't dent anywhere near as easily as MDF.

I've used 3/4 MDF for everything because it's cheap - carving it is very easy and consistent. I use polyurethane on all the edges to strengthen them. This works for me.

I think the best material for a low use template is 1/4" tempered hardboard. It files and sands great and has a nice hard-ish edge. It has to be tempered though(that dark brown), the non-tempered (beige_ is useless. In leau of that, I use 1'/4 mdf. After I'm done with the final shaping of it, I coat all of the bearing edges with this super glue... it hardens the edge really nicely. Then I gloss 'em out with some sliver scotchbrite.

If I going to be using the template a lot, I use the above material to make a "master" template, then I transfer rout it to a piece of Finform. It's a phenolic coated Finnish Birch Plywood. The phenolic keeps it flats and slides beautifully over tool beds, and the Finnish (or Baltic) plywood has zero voids... good stuff.

I cut my master template out of plexi using a laser cutter straight from a computer drawing, then rout a secondary template out of MDF.
There is a couple places in my area that have access to an Epilog laser cutter, the results are so accurate/easy, it almost feels like cheating :-).

Yeah, MDF is dusty but it's cheap. Good Baltic birch works but it's expensive, I've not always been happy with the birch plywood avaible at Lowes...Baltic it's not; too many voids.

I get 1/2" Lexan scraps at work to make some but I HATE using straight router bits on this stuff. Lexan can be a little "grabby".

Standard plywood...I've never even considered it and it would probably be my last choice.

1/4" hardboard used to be easy to find. Now 3/16" is the thickest I can find at the home stores. I use washers to lift it off of the material so the bearing rides fully on the hardboard.

I've used aluminum too but I usually use that for uncomplicated shapes. I recently made an aluminum template for drilling the string holes, bridge screw holes and neck pocket. I used the milling machine at work to locate the holes to the Down's .pdf specs and the minor dimensions of the neck pocket. I brought it home and fastened a "store bought" template to the aluminum one to get the angles of the neck pocket and used a standard carbide router bit and SLOWLY removed the tiny bit of aluminum. Now here's the funny part......NEVER DO THIS ON A ROUTER TABLE!! It never crossed my mind that the thin aluminum shavings would get sucked down into the router windings. The fireworks were brief but very exciting in a clenched sphincter kinda way.

1/4" hardboard would be my first choice, but for pickguards where you're going to run a beveled bit, you need something thicker to ride the bearing a little higher - 1/2" at least - and there my vote is baltic birch ply or, even better, MDF. Then again, I've got a shopvac, a dust collector, and an air cleaner in the shop.