Musings

Desk Moldings III

With the fairly straightforward triple moldings on the feet completed and my broken arm on the mend, albeit still fairly weak, it was time to move on to the double moldings on the thinner upright sections of the legs(?).  These presented the additional challenge of including sixteen inside-corner sections that could not be completed with only scratch stock cutters.

Since the scratch stock cutter for the triple moldings was also perfectly sized for the double moldings on the thinner “legs” I gave it a try but soon decided that I needed to make another scratch stock to straddle both sides tightly in order to achieve the best results.  Even so I got more chatter to the surface than I found acceptable, so in the end I wound up touching all the surfaces with rifflers.

On top of that the shape of the “legs,” and the sixteen inside corners to the molding runs left me with a fair bit of hand carving to accomplish.  I followed and extended the shoulders of the rabbet with a sharp knife and excavated them with straight carving gouges, then carved the remaining profile sections with gouges.

 

The final step of the moldings for this element was to carve the terminus of each molding run at the bottom of each “leg,” where they would join the feet.   It was fairly simple, I just whacked at the appropriate place with a carving gouge of the correct size and sweep, and removed the excess with a flat gouge.  Somehow I failed to take a photo of this area once it was all cleaned up, but you get the idea.