Hey everyone, So I want to remove the red shaded area of this guitar body. Can I simply do this with
a chisel? Or do I need something more hefty? Its about 16mm deep and the wood is basswood I believe.
Any ideas?
Cheers! 
Router will be great. Chisel will do the job as well
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Like Ray says, both will work. Getting neat edges might be a challenge. With a router you can set up fences (using straight pieces of wood, for example) to guide you. Don’t try and take out all 16mm of wood in one go — you’ll probably overload the router and burn the wood. Better to take lighter passes of 3-6mm or so at a time.
If you use a chisel and mallet without much experience, a big thing to watch out for is the wood splitting along its grain and you accidentally taking out a big chunk where you don’t intend to. To get a neat finish on the bottom, you can run your chisel along the current “naked” wood (top right of the image) and pare the final shavings of wood away. Don’t try and take too much in this operation, because that’s where it could split.