Well I have created what I think is a pretty good start to some crown for a cabinet I have been working on. I followed Lonnie Birds method of building built up crown. It alleviates the need for fancy cutters, shapers, and other high dollar machines and I would imagine it is probably the way it was done for centuries before the cutters and shapers hit the industry.

 

You can see the first shot I cut the cove piece on the table saw, Lonnie used a band saw but I felt it was much easier to do it on the table saw, for me anyway. I set my tilt at 23 degrees just as Lonnie did with his 23 degree block.

 

 

After I cut the 23 degree angle on the cove piece, I set a couple boards for guides to cove cut on the table saw. For specific instructions on setting the guide boards, Lonnie covers it in great detail, much better then I can here, so please see Lonnie's method!

 

 

 

I took 1/16th inch nibbles off the cove piece. It only took a matter of a few minutes to come up with my cove portion of the built up crown.

Here is a hint, take slow passes, the finish on the cut is better then if you push it through quicker. Just like a surface planer, the slower the board feeds, the better the finish. You'll still get some heavy saw blade marks, but not as bad. Here we go, some nicely shaped coves to make up the lower portion of the crown. You can see the short chamfer at the bottom, I changed that later to a longer chamfer to make it look more graceful, you'll see in the later shots.

 

 

Next photo you'll see where I used a scraper to get the kerf marks off of the cove piece. It took about 20 minutes to scrape both pieces, and some burnt fingers! The curl showed up finally after some scraping.

 

 

Now in Lonnie's presentation, he used two different profiles than what I used. I wanted dentil for my second built up layer instead of the ogee pattern Lonnie used.

I used the same method you would use to cut box joints on the tablesaw to create my dentil.

I made this quick little jig to cut my dentil, it took all of 5 minutes to get this little jig up and running, and now I'll have it for future dentil projects.

 

 

I'll screw this jig to my miter fence,

 

 

And now you can see my dentil getting created!

 

 

The above dentil is cut at 1/2". I was not happy with it, it seemed to big for the case it is going on, so I changed it up, and I created another dentil jig for 1/4" dentil, and it looks much better.

 

 

As a result of my two test runs, I now have two jigs for two sizes of dentil in the future.

 

 

You can now see how this is all coming together

 

 

 

You can see the top layer with the quarter round profile, it is too simplistic for the case I am building, so I went to the Ogee profile for the top piece.

 

 

The above photo is the crown in place and we are doing some final trimming to fit just right. The very top is the very top, the miter is a bit rough, that will be cleaned up when I plane flush the front edge. The very top edge is going to get a negative quarter round profile, to give it a flowing up appearance.

 

 

I think it turned out pretty good. I had fun with this, we can make virtually any crown profile if you just take the time to plan and section up the profiles into individual pieces and then build it up.

 

 

The crown is not secured or glued yet, I'll snap some pics once I get it all secured, miters planed to perfection and ready to stain. Thanks for looking!

Nice job with the crown and the tutorial!

Thanks Allen! It sure has opened up some doors in the world of creating custom crown! No longer are we restricted to the big box or mills.

John,

Looks real good. Is it as easy as you are making it look?

 

 

Great looking molding John, and the possibilities are endless with this method.

Yes Larry it is really easy. The hardest part for me was to visualize a combination that would look good. So I took to paper and pencil and just drew a series of profiles out until one looked fine and I could cut it with the router bits I have. The Crown also had to look really close to the crown in the picture, this is what the customer wants, and I think I have maintained the feel pretty closely. The difference in the shelf I made and the customers photo below, is our shelf has an extra shelf for a total of 4, and we have a back on ours, the rest is pretty near to close as you see it.

 

They sure are Greg, the possibilities are endless, I am really glad I stumbled onto Lonnie's way of doing this. Now we can cut any crown in any species.

I do basicly the same thing one some of my picture frames, using different combinations of molding to get a unique look.

nice job.

like the dental work.

 

Hey Cliff, did you get my last email on the site side of things?

First chance I got to see this and it looks great John. Excellent tutorial with some really good pictures.