Inside his Philadelphia workshop, luthier and musician Victor Baker is establishing a reputation for building high-quality custom guitars. He uses the finest woods and creates well-tuned designs, plus he is able to make a living at it by blending old-world techniques with modern-day equipment.

His shop is one of several workspaces inside a brick industrial building under renovation in the Germantown district of Philadelphia. The dusty industrial space once housed a mattress factory, evident by old sewing needles wedged between the floorboards. Now it’s home to several woodworkers and the recently opened Philadelphia Furniture Workshop.

For the most part, Baker’s section of the shop is unassuming. There are a few banged up benches, lumber storage, clamps, and some basic power tools. The elephant in the room is a massive CNC router table, called a Techno Isel, that uses a robotic router with a high-speed bit to shape wood parts in three dimensions.

“It cost about as much as a small car,” Baker says of the machine.

But it was money well spent, he adds. The CNC router can shape complex curved parts for his guitars with more precision than traditional hand and power tools, and it can do it in just a fraction of the time.

“It really frees you up to be creative and not get bogged down in roughing work,” he said.

Mastering the machine, however, takes more than just a woodworker’s sensibilities. The brain of the machine is a computer software program that translates CAD drawings into three-dimensional cuts. Baker wields his mouse like a block plane as he navigates his way through a CAD software program called Rhino, which he uses to produce three-dimensional renderings of guitars parts.

A graduate of Berklee School of Music in Boston, Baker has studied jazz guitar for more than 25 years, and says that his musicianship is even more of an asset to his craft than his background in woodworking.