Using a router to create custom molding

I turn to the books “Woodworking with the Router” and “Router Magic” a lot. They are great resources.

For curved moulding, you will probably want to make segments with mitered ends and attach them together into the rough shape of your moulding. Then mount them to a sacraficial “table top”. Find the center of your arc and attach a block the same height as your moulding to the sacraficial top. Drill a hole in the block and use a trammel to cut the arcs.

There are ways to set up a router table for this kind of work, but unless you are going to produce a lot of curved molding, I think the trammel method is your best bet.

-- Coffee is best with a fine layer of sawdust on top. -- http://www.north40custom.com

When making moldings with the router, I generally feed a larger piece of stock into the tool and then seperate the molding off with the table saw. Then back to the router to send the stock through again. Some moldings I have made required that I set up a second saw (my portable jobsite saw) to cut a bevel along teh length of the stock to reduce the amount of material the router needed to remove, then as previously stated, rip off the molding and start again.

By the way, always make plenty of extra. It’s better to have more than you need than to need to replicate your efforts for an extra foot later.

Ed

-- Come on in, the beer is cold and the wood is dry. www.crookedlittletree.com

Thanks Ed…I have use the techniques you described above. What I am looking for and hoping to find is some kind of book or information showing diffirent profiles of moldings and which router bits to use to create different types of moldings. I have watched Norm on the New Yankee to get a good idea of the different setups required to accomplish the tasks. I am just hoping to find some kind of discriptive information on which bits can create what kind of moldings.

I have the tools and the basic ability to use them, with books like “Router Magic”, but I am in the need for specific knowledge on creating different moldings with the router, WITHOUt having to invest into a molding cutter!

For those of us who don’t “have an eye” for such things, it seems like trial and error is the way to go. That’s basically how I’ve built up moldings. I’ll take a couple of different bits and then stack up the results until I get something that looks like what I want.

-- When you give someone a chance it may well be their last.

Thanks Russel…........as you can see on my project…the bedroom furniture I built….I did use that technique. I guess I was just hoping that there might me somekind of information available that would help me develop more of an eye for future projects.

Curently, my mother law has an old barn that I am aquiring some unbelivable old white oak boards from and just want to make sure I utilize this hard to come come by wood in the best possible way.

Its like finding gold. I was expecting to find southern yellow pine, and when I discovered that it was built with mostly white oak…...well…..I was blown away.

I’ve never seen a detailed book that has info quite like that. It would be a good one to have, but with the limitless possible combinations, you could have a pretty big reference manual there!

One suggestion I’ve seen is to take stencil-weight plastic sheet and trace the profile of your bits onto the sheet, then cut out the profiles into a bunch of little patterns. Then you can arrange the patterns in different combinations until you find a profile you like.

-- Coffee is best with a fine layer of sawdust on top. -- http://www.north40custom.com

Now that is a very good idea…........thanks much Peter. And now that I am thinking along those lines, since I don’t have a huge amount of router bits, but do have catalogs showing profiles, I will try cutting some of those out and see what I can come up with. Thanks again Peter!!