Only sort of OT

I had a molding head once. Don't know where it is now, don't care. After it whacked, splintered and flung a piece of wood with climbing grain back at the wall I decided that something moving at 3450 with three knives was too easy to overfeed. Makes too big a bite, leading (On Topic) to a catch too easily.

You'll note that the trend in router and shaper bits, which move at an average of three to five times the rate is to limit the bite by adding structure ahead of the cutters to help with overfeeding tendencies.

Now if you have an automatic feeder and dual-direction hold-downs, maybe. Personally I'd go shaper for long runs, router for short, using multiple cutters to produce complex shapes. Takes a bit of planning to get the cut series down, taking advantage of good points of stabilization, but it's well worth it, in my estimation.

Made a hell of a scary noise, too.

I think that they have dropped out of favor as kick-back-prone, and perhaps also finish-quality-problem-prone.

The fact that I don't see any on Lee Valley's site is somewhat damning.

but here's a couple (not cheap) that claim to be available via Amazon...

...OK, screw that link, it's a half a mile long.

Go to amazon, search for "molding blade table saw" in home improvement. There are two purple arbors, plus a bunch of cutter profiles.

Me, I'd go the route of multiple-pass setups on the router table for patterns that were not available as a a one-pass profile, given the constraints of not buying a shaper and not having a CNC router to make the multiple passes for you. Or not worry about it - all depends on how hard you want to try to be the area's millwork supplier, but you have to figure that a serious millwork supplier is running a 4-sided molding machine with automatic feeders, and charging enough to cover the machine, the stuff that comes out wrong and needs to be tossed in the burn pile, and the original stock.

The other direction would be to run the profiles with hand planes, and charge a premium for the authentic touch, while being able to listen to yourself think as you make them.

....

I don't know if the Sears unit interchanges, but I see cutter heads still available there. Not bad, one was $12

If you wanted to make enough trim to do a bedroom suite or a coffee table, the molding head for a table saw might work OK. I have one, I used it, I hated it. Not just a little, either.

1) When mounted on a ts, the head doesn't spin fast enough to cleanly cut the wood. If you hit a tiny irregularity in the wood (that would look good finished) you will have tear out, chipping, and in some cases, this will be where the blade grabs your piece and goes for launch. Make no mistake, either - unless your pieces are about 6 ft long or less, this is a 2 man operation due to the necessity of holding the materail perfectly agains the spinning head

2) If you are running presized material through the ts (like a 1X2), then you have to use hold downs and featherboards on it (you should anyway) not just to avoid shooting out of the shop, but when this head hits the tougher areas of wood, it cuts slower and will lift the wood away from the cutters, giving a more shallow profile

3) It is painful to sharpen the cutters, and they don't stay sharp. Since the blades go slower and by their design don't cut as well, they get dull MUCH faster. This is the death of your profile. If the cutters get dull and you continue to use the tool, you will screw up your material. When you sharpen, it will change the profile a little, just a little, but sometimes that is too much. It is OK for some ceiling moldings, but if you are matching trims on kitchen cabs it is unacceptable

4) Even when mine was new, the blades were sharp, and the sun was shining and the birds were singing, it didn't work well. The end product didn't look really finished or consistent in the profiles. The details of the profile were never really sharp and cleanly cut

The only one I know that still has this is one of my hardwood suppliers. You leave him a drawing or a piece of molding you want matched. He will take it back to his guy that will convert it to a file for the CNC mill that will make the correctly profiled blades. It is not cheap.

I ONLY do that when I have a remodel in an older home and we have to match moldings.

I agree with the other posts, but with small difference. For a small run, I buy something as close as possible to what I need. For a medium amount of trim, the same. In fact, for all the trim, I buy it. I have no clue how anyone makes money milling unless they can really get their price for it.

Seriously though, if I were to have the urge to make moldings, I would make small projects (a few cabinets) on my router table which has a 3 hp, 1/2 shank collet on it. I wouldn't consider anything smaller.

For a more than that, I would purchase a shaper. If you have a sizeable order and will continue to use the machine, why not buy a medium sized machine? The machine and cutter heads are expensive to get into, but to me worth the quality of the end product you get for the investment. Plus... it is much faster.

I don't know what is sizable to you since you didn't say. But the last house I trimmed that had all custom molding inside had about 4500

• of of molding in it. Two piece crown, two piece base (the six inch with the colonial dust cap on it), 4" door jambs, profiled window stool (think table top profile) with apron, etc. You get the picture. To me that would have been a sizeable order to make. But to trim out a house like that, it wasn't really that big of a job; the house was just a bit under 3000 sq ft, so it wasn't like I was trimming a monster.

For that much molding/millwork, a shaper is the ONLY way to go.

At this point with my experience with them, I would consider money on one of those molding heads a complete waste.

Robert

This is basically the only job I do- there isn't much point in me trying to compete with the big guys who can run a house full of trim in 20 minutes! What I bid for, and usually get, are jobs where I'm matching 6-30' of trim to an exisiting profile that is no longer offered at any of the local suppliers.

It depends on the amount of practice you have, I think. For my part, I did the same thing I'm doing at home as part of my job a while back, and got pretty fast at doing the setups accurately. Even so, the bulk of my profit does not come from the milling itself, it is from the sealing, staining, and topcoat.

I'll continue to use the machine, undoubtedly- but I only get one or two of these jobs a year. It would take forever to pay for itself at that rate! I'd be better off turning them down and doing something else entirely if I had to invest more than a couple hundred bucks in tooling- but since they're usually jobs done as favors for people I know, and I'm willing to get paid less than I'd like to help them out, I usually do them.

Sizeable, for my home shop, is about 400 linear ft. Any more than that, and I send them to a store. Even if I could produce more, I don't want the hassle of storing it even for a short time, and I'm not very interested in running a factory in my basement!

Duly noted- thanks for the advice from all of you. I had figured it was similar in use to a dado stack, but it sounds like I'm better off sticking with my "whatever I've already got that will get it made" technique. No point in investing in something that won't perform.

Maybe one of these days, I'll replace the planer with one of those Grizzly beasts that does double-duty as a planer and moulder. The auto-feed and top rollers aught to make it a worthwhile proposition.

The Sears molding head, as of a few years ago, was a quality piece. I have no reason to believe they are any different now. These things work just fine as long as you understand what you are doing. Feed rate and rigidity are everything. Approach it as a machinist, not a wood hack and it will work fine.

I had the Sears head umpteen years ago. If I needed to make a small amount of custom molding, I'd give it serious consideration again. It only has three blades, possibly making a fairly wide cut. Feed fairly slowly and sneak up on your profile.

And stay out of the line of fire. But you already knew that. ;-)

Bill

Hey- thanks for the links, Tony!

It would appear that I was making the same mistake over and over when searching- Delta calls it a "moulding cutterhead", and some of these are "molding cutterheads." So I missed the third-party sellers.

If I do go this route, I am thinking that I will install a pair of rollers with a set of anti-kickback fingers over the work, and try it that way. That should provide the rigidity, at least. Maybe if I get it and like it, I'll look into a smallish power feed to get the consistant feed rate- While I can probably do fine manually, I know Grizzly sells a number of them for reasonable prices, and it'd be handy for dadoing as well.

I too have a Sears moulding head and am very pleased with it. I've had it about 30 years so i can't comment on the new ones. What is nice is they sell straight cutters for rabbetting and I have ground my own profiles on them when needed. A pair of "Board Buddies" or similar will eliminate most of the chatter and prevent kick backs. More important is a custom insert in the table that fits the width of the cutters. Make them out of 1/2" Baltic birch and make sure they are secured! Give the fence and table a good wipe down with some kitchen wax paper before you start and you will end up with mouldings that don't need sanding. You should not sand mouldings anyway as you lose all the nice sharp crisp details. Stock selection is also critical and one of the best woods in my opinion is tulip poplar also known as black poplar or tulip wood or poplar depending where you live. Anyway its the olive green stuff with the dark lines and creamy sapwood. I find this can be stained and finished to match almost any exotic or domestic hardwood. Use a conditioner or a bleach and then conditioner depending on the wood you are matching. Go for it I think it will do all you need