| by Ed Williams, a frequent contributor to the JLC Finish Carpentry
Forum and works carpentry in Dallas, Texas. |
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| If you’re lucky enough to stay in the carpentry
business long enough, you’ll see a lot of strange things,
like the crown molding in this article. Just when you think an architect
has designed something else that ‘can’t be done’,
remember the word “skill” in skilled craftsman. |
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| To cut a 45° miter on this Honduran mahogany
cove molding, I made a miter box and used a trusty old handsaw—you
know, that thing some people hang on their living room walls? |
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| Back before the invention of the motorized mitersaw,
we used this same setup to cut compound joinery. It was the best
way, the only way, and sometimes still is today. Just ask D.K. Merk's
framers (that's Jeremy--with the white hat--and David Pugh up there
on the scaffold; Ron Johnson--D.K.'s head carpenter--is in the picture
below). When these guys first saw the crown on this job, they took
off their hats and scratched their heads. |
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| I made them a u-shaped channel, about
an inch taller than the leg of the molding. The leg is the portion
of the crown that mounts on the wall, the head mounts to the ceiling.
I added a couple of triangular braces inside the box (out of the
way of both the miter cut and the molding) to hold the box square.
The box is wide enough to accommodate several different head sizes
of moldings simply by changing the width of the stop that's temporarily
screwed to the bottom of the box. |
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| But the molding on this job was bigger than the blade on my
24 in. handsaw! |
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| So I scribed two plates of plywood to fit the molding as it
stood in-position in the box. Next I over-cut the miter by the width
of the plates (plus the set on the saw), then dropped them into
the box on each side of the cut line. I made the plates a little
short so the molding would slide easily through the box. |
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| A triangular brace at the back of each plate ensures a perfect
90° angle to the top and bottom of the box. |
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| The plates not only made it easier to cut a perfectly straight
line—without binding the saw... |
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| ...but the framers could cut from both sides of the box. |
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| I could have made two cuts in the box, but didn’t
have big enough pieces of scrap plywood on the job, so I made two
boxes, one for right-hand and one for left-hand cuts. I gave the
boxes to the framers, said “Good Luck!” then drove off
real quick, just in case the miters didn’t work—you
don’t want to be around a bunch of angry framers. |
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| When I came back the next day the framers were all smiles. Sometimes
the old tricks are the best tricks. |
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