duplicating the horizontal grooves in this molding?

[Michael Weber]

The picture is of my living room door casings. molding.jpgI'd really like to make something similar (on a slightly smaller scale) for the casings around my living room windows I'm getting ready to take out and rebuild. Right now they have a modern casing around them that a PO has put in. I can see making all the horizontal grooves one at a time with a router to be a real pain and very time consuming. Any kind of modern molding have horizontal grooves I could use and build up the rest of the profile? Or, anyone have an idea on a jig or method to speed up the process of cutting the grooves? I'm going to need in the neighborhood of 50 feet or so. Is this something a CNC machine could do on boards 6 feet long or so? The pictured grooves are 2 inches long and 3/16 inch wide and about 3 grooves per inch.

[david brum]

If you decide to cut them with a router, I can imagine some type of jig that indexes into the previous cut, like a box joint jig. If you set up something with a groove for a router bushing to ride in, you could easily control the length of each cut. It would be tedious work but shouldn't take forever.

[Jeff Duncan]

That's an odd casing, I haven't seen one with horizontal grooves like that before. I wouldn't want to do it with a router though it is certainly feasible, just a long and arduous task. Then again it's only 50', so once you get your jig set up, just a matter of standing there and routing close to a couple thousand little flutes

A CNC can cut to the length of it's capacity....or in other words you need a CNC with a capacity of 6'. Which really shouldn't be a problem as most of the CNC routers out there are going to be capable of routing 4' x 8' sheets. Only problem there may be cost, not sure how much programming required on something like that, but that's where most time is spent.

Lastly you can look online to see if there's a molding that fits your needs....google is a wonderful thing! Unless that's some companies stock molding though, (doubtful), it's probably unlikely you'll actually find it.

good luck,
Jeffd

[Van Huskey]

I agree across the board with Jeff. Could be done with a router and purpose built jig and unless you have a CNC it may be the only cost effective way to do it.

[Michael Weber]

Thanks, indexing with a router one slot at a time was what I was hoping to avoid. The story that came with the house is that the owner, who was quite well-to-do (at least his FIL was) brought the moldings in the living room back from England in the 20's when the house was built. I have googled for moldings and found nothing remotely similiar. Anyone in the western Arkansas area with a CNC machine?

[HANK METZ]

I would approach this as an assembly rather than trying to knock it all out of one piece. Treat it as you would dentil molding, cut shallow cross grain dado’s in as wide a board as you can, rip off 2” wide sections and inlay onto a backer board grooved out to receive it. I doubt you’d need the dado to be more than 3/16” deep x 3/16” wide, therefore the dentil board could be about 7/16- 1/2” thick. Plough the appropriate width and depth groove in the main plank and pre install or do it after hanging.

46083-438x.jpg


- Beachside Hank

Do not use remaining fingers as push sticks.

[Sam Murdoch]

The clean terminations at each end of the rout are the challenge. Some one was a very patient woodworker in the days before CNCs.
Set yourself with some hand tools and have a quiet and satisfying long weekend project? Good luck with this one.

[Michael Weber]

Thanks Sam, wish I was good enough and patient enough to do something like this by hand but sadly I'm neither.
Hank, a good suggestion on doing a wide board and cutting it down to 2 inch widths, then inlaying it or maybe just butting it up to other pieces of the molding. Wouldn't work on a table saw because of the round bottoms but I could adapt to a router set up. It would leave me with squared off ends to the grooves instead of round like the original but might look okay. Something to play with. Thanks
BTW, here's a picture of more of the molding, something I WON'T be duplicatingdetail.jpg

[Jeff Duncan]

If your going to go through the trouble of doing it, I'd just do all the individual cuts so you get the rounded ends. Otherwise your still doing a LOT of work and will have an obviously different molding anyway for all your trouble.

Second point, that second picture of the doorway is not any harder nor complicated then the fluting. You can buy those applied moldings online and they just get glued to the flat base piece. Much, much easier than the fluting....trust me!

Really the only difficulty is doing the fluting and it's not difficult so much as it's time consuming. Very, very, time consuming

good luck,
jeffD