Monday – Crown Molding

Being Monday the morning was spend doing books and preparing checks for the boss’ signature. But because I’m still running behind I put in some extra hours this evening to get today’s work completed.

I started by dadoing the sides for Deborah’s bottle stopper rack. This uses a special jig that I built to be sure everything comes out square and properly spaced. Then I sanded the parts and assembled the rack with glue and clamps.

Afterward I quickly applied the first coat of polyurethane to Phyllis’ bag handles. Then packaged and shipped Caroline's 2 pair of bag handles.

Then I got down to the nitty gritty: making and installing crown molding on Blake & Marilyn’s curio. Because they have to be made of maple to match the case, I could not use manufactured crown moldings. So I bought a crown molding router bit that I thought would be close to the profile in the picture they provided me to work off. That arrived some weeks ago, so I chucked it up in the router and ran a test piece.

This would be much easier if I had a molder-planer, but I don’t. I haven’t had enough need for one to be worth shelling out $3,500 for even a small one. If we start doing very much of this I’ll have to find the money to get one; it would be much quicker. But I managed to get it done with the router bit in my router table. Then I trimmed and sanded the molding strips and got ready to do the mitering.

Quite recently we bought a “chop saw” for cross cutting long boards and doing miters. I’m glad we did, for it was very handy on this job. I carefully laid out the miter locations, snuck up on the final cuts with the chop saw, test fitted them, drilled pilot holes for the small nails, then glued and nailed the crown moldings in place.

That used up a good long day. I’m beat and ready for a shower.

Tomorrow we’ll start on the column trim. See you then.

Doug