I walked in and I knew within two minutes that this was a quality-built house. It was a modest split-level—-no vaulted ceilings, no spectacular centerpiece. In fact there was nothing “outstanding.” Even the trim was simple and unobtrusive, but a close look around the windows showed precise mitered angles and no sign of nails. It was the trim around the bottom of the wall that said the most: tight corners and carefully constructed returns. Very few people bother to do that today.
Trim and moldings were once the most obvious part of both furniture and house interior finishing. There were simple mechanical reasons why most of it has disappeared today. The beauty and creativity of molding designs was an outgrowth of the need to hide construction joints as well as junctions between different materials. Modern materials have changed all that. With drywall returns on windows and tapered corners, many modern houses now use trim only to hide the door frames and the intersection between walls and floors.
We can bemoan the sterilized look of particleboard furniture and box-like houses—-or we can see the absence of joints as liberating molding from its mechanical need to hide something, allowing its shape and placement to be determined solely by our esthetic desires.
Making your own moldings is one of the most satisfying ways of letting your creativity show in your woodworking. Although routers can easily decorate edges and with a bit of work even make full moldings, it is the table saw outfitted with a three blade molding head that can really produce. In my experience the keys to success in making molding or trim on a table saw are very simple:
- Use very sharp knives.
- Use wood that is either flat or easily pressed flat on the table.
- Use firm hold-downs that prevent vibration.
- Advance the wood just fast enough to prevent burning but just slowly enough to avoid “waves” on the face of the wood.
Honing your molding knives for that very clean cut is easier than it may seem. Never try sharpening the curved end: You won’t get all three to match. Lay each knife flat on a very flat sharpening stone and grind the entire side of the knife, the same length of time for each one. You won’t make it much thinner but you will hone the cutting edge and keep all three blades exactly the same shape and lengh.
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