How to Make Base Molding

This grandfather clock calls for a base or skirt, right down here that's gonna wrap around the bottom. It's something you can do as a shop-made molding. There's a good detail of it here. And really what I wanna talk about is how we can produce this through multiple cuts, multiple laminations of wood in order to build this up. So, here on the detail, everything's called out for us. It's gonna be 1 1/8" thick. Lookin' up at the details that are included in the profile there a lot of steps and a lot of curves. This is somethin' where you look at this and say, "Oh my gosh, where I'm gonna get a router bit?" Or a shaper cutter that looks like that. And the answer is, think about this in two passes, or two layers instead of just in a single. So here I've got a 1/4" beading bit and when I hold that up against the profile it looks suspiciously like what I'm tryin' to do here. So in fact the way this gonna get generated is we're gonna use two distinct layers. A 3/8 beading bit on one and a 1/4" beading on the other and when we done and we put those layers together we're gonna have exactly the profile that we're tryin' produce here. This is the first of two profiles that we're gonna cut. What I've done so far is put a 5/8" thick board through the router table. I've got a 1/4" beading bit in there right now and that 1/4" beading bit is the beginning of the curved and stepped profile that we wanna produce for this plan. Now, the grandfather clock requires various pieces of this skirt molding. The easiest way to make this happen is to work with long pieces. We gonna end up with a lamination here of two different thicknesses. After everything is done there, then you can cut those into the shorter lengths, required for the project itself. Because we're working with long pieces, I've added feather boards to my router table. Those do a really good job of providing uniform down pressure. And it's really critical especially with long stuff like this, those feather boards are gonna hold it down, making sure that the profile is uniformly cut, it's the right depth, all the way down the length of this board. So next thing I'm gonna switch cutters, change my set-up just a little bit. Run another board and we'll be able to see how these components are gonna come together to complete the skirt molding for the clock. Well, that's the second profile. That's a 3/8 beading bit in 1/2" stock. Now when these two boards get laminated together, the net result is that it's gonna give us that complicated looking, but easy to produce, stepped and curved profile, called for by the grandfather clock plan.