Originally Posted by
Axel de Pugey
Sorry if this is sounds naive but I always wondered, to do the initial marking on the end grain, do you just take the iron out and draw a line arount it?
If you are planing to use several irons next to each other it must be tricky to draw accurately.
It depends on what one has on hand. For simple moldings it is easy to lay it out in one's mind. For more involved moldings it helps to have a few helpers. Various radius guides come in handy:
Radius Guides.jpg
One has to consider what planes are on hand to be used in designing a molding cut.
Sometimes it is just serendipity:
Molding End View.jpg
This was just having fun one afternoon. The profiles were cut using a pair of Stanley #45 planes. One with a beading blade and the other with a fluting blade. They were cut on the edge of 1X fir using various positions of the bead & cove element, then the molding was ripped from the board.
Once one starts making molding, it is easy to save a piece of scrap molding to use for layout in the future or one can also make a template to lay out any molding used regularly.
jtk
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)