making baseboard, crown, and chair rail

[Jeffrey M Jones]

I am nearing the end of a 5 month remodeling project. I bought a house that was in a state of disrepair next door to mom and dads, my father and I have been fixing it up nonstop every day. We gutted it. I happened to run into a guy down the street that owns and operates a sawmill on the side. Being owner of a gunstore, he bartered with me a handgun for about 150 bd feet of clear black walnut 10'x9-10"x 4/4. Some bark, some checking, but for the most part all of it is usable. My dad has a decent shop, all grizzly, and he has the 13" planer/moulder. Some of the knife sets it came with we believe are incomplete. the machine has a 3 blade head, this may be a really stupid question, but is it possible to run the machine with 1 or 2 moulding knives installed? what if the weight were offset by a counter balance away from the wood if you know what i mean? I have chair moulding knives, crown moulding knives, but all the baseboard knife sets are incomplete. Should I shell out 80$ for baseboard knives or just get a profile router bit and do it that way. Im not looking to make anything really fancy, i just want an ogee top edge and i want the baseboard to be about 4.5". What do you think?

[Rod Sheridan]

Hi Jeffery, if you could run the machine with balance weights, the issue would then become feed speed.

With less knives, you need to run at 2/3 or 1/3 speed on the feed.

I just completed a run of 8.5" high baseboard for a friend, made on a shaper.

I can't imagine doing it all with a router, so I guess if I had a moulder, I'd buy the knives.

I was running HSS knives in an insert head, the baseboard came out smoother than sanded.

When I've used routers, the finish hasn't been as good.

regards, Rod.

[Philip Johnson]

I don't own a planer moulder but thinking about one so follow the treads. If you check grizzly some knives only come as a pair. Maybe some owner will tell how it works.

Phil

[Jeffrey M Jones]

thanks for the replies guys, and I did forget to mention like Phillip above, I have also seen knives sold in pairs I would imagine most moulders are at least 3 knife heads. I know there are 4 knife heads, are there more? Like hotdogs and hotdog bun packages or am i missing something?

[Jim Flynn]

Molders and shaper heads can be had with as few as 2 and as many as 9 cutters from what I've seen. They will all process wood fine if you adjust the feed speed to the rpm of the spindle for the number of cuts / inch you want. In general on shapers when hand feeding at a reasonable feed rate 2 or maybe 3 cutter heads are most commonly used for hardwood and softwood. 4 or more cutters really require a power stock feeder to feed quickly enough to keep your cutter working optimally and for the best finish. If you feed too slowly with a multi cutter head you will usually experience burning of the cutter or the material and accelerated dulling of the cutter head.

Off the top of my head I think for walnut you'd like to have around 14 knife marks per inch for a reasonable finish so with a 2 knife cutter you would want to feed at ~40fpm at 3600 rpm.

[Peter Quinn]

Jeffrey, I really don't think it is advisable to run that machine with less than the full set of 3 balanced knives. I pulled the manual for a quick look, and it is clearly meant to spin three knives. Even with three you are probably looking at multiple passes for a crown to achieve any kind of decent results. It looks like you have two geared feed speed choices and should be running moldings on the slower gear set. Do you have the feed gear sets? In any event you cant slow it any further to compensate for the decrease in knives.

I have heard of people running a woodmaster on a single knife with a balancing blank on the other side, but I think that is a much more powerful machine with greater variable speed control. The through molders where I work can run 2, 4, or 6 knives, but it gets pretty tricky I'm told to perfectly align 6 knives, so most things are run with 2 or 4 knives in a 4 knife head with balancing blanks in the other two. Those are 50HP 6 head machines spinning 6" diameter heads on a 50MM shafts, by the way, so not much in common with a mini molder. Whole different enchilada.

It looks like all the Grizzly knives are sold in sets of three for that tool, so either you are missing some, or you have the wrong knives. Grizzly also sells 2 knife sets for the SHop Fox (hussey clone) molder which is a 2 knife head. Possible the original owner bough the wrong knives? I have the shop fox in my shop and would never consider running it on less than a full set of knives.

In any event for the $20 it costs for the base molding and chair rail sets, I'd just buy them. The crown sets are all $80, which is certainly cheaper than trying to buy custom made walnut crown, or even cheapo finger joint pine or MDF crown from the borg over any decent lineal footage. I've run base molding and base cap on a router table in a pinch, but its such a PIA over any footage, and it doesn't like it if your stock is anything but very flat and straight. A shaper or molder will tolerate a bit more twist in the stock than a hand fed router table set up. Maybe for a small replacement or a piece of furniture, but not for a whole house in my mind. Do you like sanding moldings?

How long is your material? Have you though about a strategy for straight lining these lenghts? I like crown in the 12'-14' range, or you get scarfs way too often for my taste in stain grade work. And walnut is not easy to grain match.