Steps we take to make solid wood moldings.

Yesterday was a busy day at the Sawmill. We where able to get approx. 300 liner feet of oak casing and 160 liner feet of oak baseboard through are old Foley Belsaw molder. We can make some nice looking moldings here at the sawmill however the way we go about it is quite time consuming based on the type of equipment we use for the manufacturing of the moldings. I thought it might be interesting for some of you to understand the steps we take to make our moldings.

First we have to select the wood to match the amout of moldings we are planning to make then It takes many passes through the planner to dimention the wood to the proper thickness then we have joint one edge of all the lumber on our jointer. After that we take the lumber to the table saw to rip the blanks out. After that we have to size the width of the blanks to the proper dimension. Once that is finished we then get out the molder and set it up to run the back relief on the moldings once all the trim has it;s back relief added then we set up the molder for the main profile. This step often takes two passes. After all the molding has been profiled then we take all the moldings to the chop saw and cut the splits check and any bad snip off the ends. After that we take the moldings to our bench and hand sand them to take off any possible rough edges. Then we measure and package the moldings for our customer. As you can see there are quite a few steps that takes time to produce solid wood trim.

Today many molding manufactures have large multi head molders that are able to take a rough blank run it through the molder and a finished product comes out. These are very specialized machines that cost allot of money, tooling and skill to set up and operate but once set up they can make a lot of molding very quickly. Well we all need to have dreams, for now I will keep the old Foley Belsaw turning.