Custom Spindle Moulder Cutters

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deema

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I have a project to make a number of meters of skirting that has to match the rest of the house. It’s a little unusual, and not a ‘standard‘ pattern that you can find in say the older joinery books / product catalogues. The skirting is circa 200mm tall (8”) circa 30mm thick and the moulding is circa 75mm or 3” deep.
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It would be I believe almost impossible to make this with a router, apart from anything else matching the profile would be very difficult. A spindle is the ideal machine for shirt runs.....a six cutter would be the weapon of choice for long runs.
The machining could be done in one pass with a dedicated cutter, an 80mm cutter would be needed. However, I don’t have a 80mm block to hold the cutters, and didn’t want to buy one, only because I rarely need to do such large mouldings.

The original skirting was made out of unsorted redwood, which has lots of issues, including warping and cupping which can be seen on the sample I was given. The new skirting is to be made from 30mm MR MDF to avoid these problems.

I have opted to make this with three different setups. The first will cut the hollow (not sure if there is a proper name for it), this was made using a standard off the shelf 40mm Euro cutter.
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The second part was to cut the rebate using a 4 knife 100mm tall carbide knife rebate block.
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The last part, which I haven’t yet done is to add the moulding. For this I needed a custom made cutter.
Initially a drawing of the profile needs to be created. I’m old school and a paper and pen is a quick and easy way of achieving this. Firstly the skirting was laid on a piece of paper and the profile traced. From this all the measurements were taken.
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A fellow member on this forum had used a company local to me that I was not aware of, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to try them out.

I sent the enquiry on Sunday afternoon, and to my surprise and delight at 8am on the following Monday morning I had a full cad drawing of the cutter in my email for my approval. Outstanding! This Is the company:

https://www.profiledesigntooling.com/
I gave Brigg a call, the chap who had sent me the cad drawing to discuss (the CAD was a perfect fit) , in an ideal world I would have liked a flip flop cutter, one with the same profile on both sides, but able to turn it upside down and still run the spindle in the same direction. Brigg, was extremely helpful and highlighted that although he could make it, no problem, the unused lower profile would rub and cause problems. So instead he offered to add another ‘useful’ profile on the bottom side. I opted for a standard radius I use.

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Brigg promised I’d have the cutters by Wednesday, again, superb service. So, this morning I popped to the letter box after posty had been to find my cutters had indeed arrived.

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A set of 55mm cutters and limiters for £54 delivered. I will be using them tomorrow to finish of the skirting. However, I have to say I would recommend Brigg if your looking for custom profile cutters. They can do most sizes of cutters, including the 80mm if I had gone down that path.
 
Just for completeness the finished product. A perfect match.
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Very good.
I find that HSS cutters have very little life when used on MDF, some in the past have not even done a 100m.
 
Very good.
I find that HSS cutters have very little life when used on MDF, some in the past have not even done a 100m.

Yes its pretty abrasive, for a "house style" moulding that's gets repeated, it's best to get profiles ground onto blanks with TCT tips.

I find tricoya very hard on cutters.

I re sharpen HSS cutters - using some small flat diamond stones and some little diamond slips.

It works pretty well - It works twice and worth it for short runs.

I also hone surface planer cutters - in the machine, Indo that twice before blade changing.
 
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