Making molding

John Dow

Former Member (at his request)
Messages
535
Just a few photos of Tuesday afternoon's activities, running 7' of rosewood molding for Jean's bath cabinet. Trouble with old molding planes, is some hack always seems to have butchered the iron so it hardly matches the sole. I think I've almost got this one right.

Picture's aren't the greatest, kinda contrasty down in the basement.

John
 
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I paint the iron with lay out dye or a magic marker, then scribe it to the sole to get a matching profile. This is the part I've got a lot of trouble with, as I've never made a right angle scriber to do it right. It also assumes the sole is consistent, which is not always the case. I made a little jig to hold the handpiece of a Foredom tool at 30 degrees for grinding the concave bevels. Its still slow, but quicker than using just a slipstone.

With this particular plane, the bead part of the profile is only 3/8" or so, and too tight to get the scribe from my square in there. Also the plane appears to be shop made, and has no spring, so the mouth is not consistent, making a little scribe with the ball on the end rather in-accurate. This one was pretty close though, so I used a coarse slip and trial and error to get it right (or close enough to use for a while in this case).

Thanks for having a look,

John
 
Molding planes are one slope I have stayed away from. Just too many out there to temp me! :) Always curious about them but just never tried one. Thanks for the photos.

Jeff
Only slightly tempted at this point. ;)
 
Thanks, John. Pretty much how I do it as well.

Jeff, complex molders like John's are a pretty quick may to make moldings--certainly in the lineal footage needed for furniture. Getting/finding decent molders in a scale for smaller furniture is the "fun" part. Much less getting them with sound bodies.

English ones still show up on eBay a lot, though. Just look for obvious cracks in the body, even signs of wear down the bottom and an iron which still has plenty of meat to it.

This is one I might have passed up seeing it on eBay, simply because there was so little of the iron left. Difficult to see in the first picture, but if you look directly behind the wedge, you can see the end of the iron well below the top of the wedge--obvious signs there was little iron left.

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And the profile it creates:

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This plane was made around 1750 according to the maker's mark. Lucky for me, the owners, while certainly using the plane as evidenced by the short, well sharpened iron, took very good care of it.

Take care, Mike
 
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