Crown Installation Question

[Mike Goetzke]

I made some crown molding for our kitchen cabinets (it will not touch the ceiling). I first thought it would be best to cut the pieces, finish, and then tack in place. I just cut the first/longest piece and realize there may be an advantage of finishing first and work my way around. My original thinking was I didn't want to mess up the finish while cutting. I'm having second thoughts. How is this usually done?

Plus I saw on an internet video that it is best to nail a 1x to the top of the cabinet and tack the molding into it and not nail into the cabinet face - is this correct?



Thanks

[Bill White]

Finish, cut, install, touch up.
I've used SoftWax sticks from FastCap as touch up and filler with good results.
Bill

[Sam Murdoch]

Just as Bill says, as for the 1x nailer, this would only be useful if the bottom edge of the crown needs to be so high up on your cabinet that you can't nail into the cabinet. I do occasionally add a rip of 3" x 3/4" plywood that has the correct angle on the edge or a few blocks of soft wood, also beveled, to help support the back of the crown, but that is not usually necessary.

[Rich Engelhardt]

I just this past week installed crown along the top of an old cabinet.
I used a nailer, then glued the crown to it and used a 23 ga pin nailer to hold things in place while the glue set.

I tried to prefinish the crown, but, since it's painted white I didn't get away with it.
The pin heads stood out like sore little thumbs against the white.
I tried to touch them up and that didn't work either - you could see a difference in sheen and a very slight dimple.

I ended up scuff sanding the crown, filling the teeny tiny pin holes, scuff sanding after the filler dried, priming, then two coats of white acrylic semi gloss....

Naturally, since the crown went all the way to the ceiling, I had a rare (for me) slip of the brush when cutting in around the ceiling line and slopped a bit of white semi gloss on the ceiling.
(The only good news from that fiasco is that the ceiling touched up perfectly.)

All told, that stupid 4.5 feet of crown got painted 6 times! One coat of primer and two finish coats before it went up and the same again after it went up.

Since you (OP) didn't mention what the finish is, I can't say for sure if prefinishing is a good idea or not.

I've put a lot of natural finished trim on with the 23 ga pin nailer and never had a hint of the heads show and never had to go back and touch up anything.

I should have known better though with the white paint.
White (and black) are unforgiving. Very, very, very unforgiving.