How to: Make your own trim

Unique profiles, crisp results and money in your pocket

By Steve Maxwell

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Tabletop Set-Up cont’d

With fence position finalized, adjust the featherboards’ locations with a trim strip sitting against the fence. Too far away from this wood and the featherboard fingers won’t hold trim strips with sufficient firmness. Too tight and the wood becomes difficult or impossible to push past the router bit smoothly.

Aim for a slight compression of the springy fingers of each featherboard as the wood passes by. Gauge each featherboard’s adjustment by sliding a trim strip or two across the table with the bit lowered temporarily, then tweak each featherboard’s position as necessary.

With the strips of wood in hand and the featherboards in place and adjusted, it’s time to readjust the router bit height. Set it into position by eye, and then push one of your extra trim strips through and see how the results look.

Pace Yourself

You can have all the details of your trim routing machinery set up correctly, and still get substandard trim. The final key involves feeding the wood across the router table the right way, and consistency is the name of the game. It’s essential that wood move at the correct speed and without pause. Stopping invariably leaves a little ridge in the wood, and perhaps a small burn mark. I find a feed rate that mills about 36″ of trim in 10 seconds works best. While speed is easy to maintain at the beginning and middle of a cut, it takes some planning to keep the speed consistent all the way to the end of a trim strip.

Get a helper to support and pull the leading end of the trim strip for the final part of the cut, after you can’t push it anymore because the end is too close to the bit. You’ll get even better and faster results if you keep your pile of unmilled strips close at hand, pointed in the right direction to feed into the system. Once there’s about 12″ of trim left to rout on a given strip, let your helper continue pulling it through at the correct rate while you grab the next strip and use it to push against the end of the first one. This way, the routing of one strip meshes seamlessly with the strip following it, ensuring the smoothest possible results and boosting productivity. There’s no down time because the bit is constantly cutting.

Even considering the cost of router bits, milling your own trim definitely saves money–although that’s just icing on the cake. Once you see what crisp profiles and unique shapes have to offer, you’ll be turning lots of scraps into key parts of beautiful projects.

Mopping Up Your Trim

Even with a sharp router bit and an ideal router table and fence, your trim still needs a bit of sanding. This process removes the slight mill marks that are inevitably left behind and any stray wisps of wood that sometimes remain on sharp, crisp corners. Although you can do this final sanding by hand, a sanding mop gives better results more quickly. A Canadian invention, the sanding mop is made with circular pieces of cloth-backed sandpaper mounted on a mandrel. Each disc of sandpaper is snipped around the edges to form small strips. Mount the mandrel in a drillpress or handheld drill, turn on the machine, and then press your newly milled trim against the frilly edges as they spin. Somehow, against all expectations, the surfaces of trim profiles are sanded smooth, without rounding over the all-important, crisp trim edges. For more information, go to stockroomsupply.ca.


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