How To Reproduce Wood Moldings Using Scratch Stock Technique

I recently had to duplicate a short piece of architectural molding for my house and used a very low tech method that I want to get the word out about. I checked Youtube and haven't found a video on this yet so I thought I'd do a brief overview of the project to show you what's possible. Many times in woodworking -- whether it's furniture or architectural details -- you'll need to replicate a short run of molding of a type that's not reproduced or in a wood species that's special to match the existing piece and you will never find an off-the-shelf substitute. Many millwork shops will duplicate a molding for you at great expense. This isn't feasible for a project like mine where I needed about 3 feet of convex base molding to match the existing feature.

Here is a corner of my house that had rotted out -- at least that's what I knew of -- but I also found extensive termite damage under the cypress shingles and would have to totally restructure the whole thing.
The first step was to use a profile gage to get the shape of the existing molding. This particular molding is 4-3/4" wide and a full inch thick, which is known as five-quarter stock. I took careful measurements of the angles and flats of the profile to make the reproduction as identical to the existing molding as possible. From the measurements and the profile gage I made templates out of heavy paper of the inverse profile. I transferred the profile onto a piece of scraper stock with an indelible marker. At first I thought I'd use files and a hacksaw to cut the profile in the scraper but I got tired of that after a while and used a diamond grinder wheel that I have for my work in stained glass. That made quick work of it and I finished off the last sharp corners and finer details with fine files. When I felt I had a pretty good match to the profile I clamped the scraper onto a piece of scrap wood that would serve as a guide against the edge of the board.
I prepared a piece of 5/4" stock by cutting the flats on the sides to match the existing molding leaving only the rounded profiles to scratch into the wood. Since this is very labor intensive you don't want to scratch anything into the wood that you can cut in using power tools much more quickly. This is quite a large molding and it took me about 5 hours altogether to profile the scraper and scrape the shape of about 3 and a half feet of molding. If you are making a smaller molding you will find it goes much more quickly than that. The appeal for me was that I was able to make this for free, essentially, with tools I already had lying around and end up with a quality result that would have cost many hundreds of dollars to have made at a millwork shop.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Molding (decorative)
• Wood
• Reproduction
• scraper
• scratch
• stock