Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads. 596 posts, read 2,275,350 times 117 posts, read 392,611 times 1,570 posts, read 4,609,387 times 5,286 posts, read 15,729,875 times 26,375 posts, read 33,171,360 times 4,853 posts, read 12,277,748 times You mentioned you used the right tools. What tools are you using to remove the glue? Here's my post from another thread about this. 3,612 posts, read 5,897,171 times 2,081 posts, read 3,665,074 timesI did the exact same thing in my bathroom! I did patch it but it still didn't look great so I ended up buying beadboard and chair rail molding for the bottom half of the wall and crown molding for the ceiling and for the top half I bought paintable wallpaper! Even using the right tools, it happens so don't beat yourself up over it!
1,835 posts, read 4,211,628 times Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned. October 18, 2012 Subscribe What's the proper way to accommodate a chair rail (dado rail) when hanging items on the wall?Construction How-To, Molding, Trim Carpentry By Clint C. Thomas, Esq., Photography by Shellye ThomasI recently completed the renovation of a small bedroom whose final embellishments had been put off for many years. The last two steps in the completion process were the installation of crown moulding on the ceiling and quarter-round moulding along the floor. I originally went to my local box store with the intention of purchasing both the crown and quarter-round at the same time, but quickly abandoned this idea when I saw the price of the crown. Thanks to my beautiful wife’s encouragement we shopped around at another box store and got a really good deal on a contractor’s pro-pack of crown moulding for about half of what the first box store was charging for the same product.
While we were comparing prices on the crown, I also priced pieces of quarter-round. I discovered that quarter-round, sometimes confused with “shoe-moulding,” which is not as thick in depth as quarter-round, was running about fifty cents per linear foot. For my project I needed a minimum of 30 linear feet of quarter-round. This would have cost me $15 plus $1.50 in tax. So, after finding the crown moulding that we needed for half price, my wife and I stood in the aisle looking at all of the trim work on display and tried to concoct more ways to save money. It did not take long for me to decide to mill my own quarter-round and avoid that expense completely. Yes, I know, I sound like Ebenezer Scrooge telling Cratchet to stoke the fire instead of adding coal to it. However, my money does me more good that it does the store.In my case, I already had close to a dozen 2-by-4 studs left over from a previous project, and I love to use what I already have on hand. By having the 2-by-4’s left-over it allowed me to mill my moulding at no cost at all, unless you count the electricity that was used to run the tools.
If, however, it is necessary to purchase an 8-ft. 2-by-4 stud to make the moulding, the current cost in my area for this size piece of lumber is about $2.36.I used a large diameter 3/4-in. round-over bit to make my quarter-round, which allowed me to produce three, 8-ft. long pieces out of each stud. Those three pieces total twenty-four linear feet. When the $2.36 cost of a stud is divided by 24 linear feet, this works out to less than 10 cents per linear foot compared to $0.50 per linear foot for professionally milled moulding. If I had used a smaller round-over bit, then I probably could have pulled four pieces of quarter-round out of each stud, thereby decreasing the cost per linear foot that much more.The first step in the milling process is to set up your router table if you have one, and if not, you can free-hand the round-over edge and achieve the same result albeit with a little bit more work. I already had a Freud round-over bit that I had purchased for another project.Once you have your router set up, it’s smart to run a test piece through it to see how the edge looks.
This will help you decide whether or not you need to adjust the height of the router bit up or down.After the router table is set up, run one side of a 2×4 through the table. In fact, I usually make a couple of passes to ensure a smooth finish on the millwork. This is especially necessary if you are using a large bit like I did. The bigger the bit, the more wood that it takes off, and this usually requires several passes to achieve a smooth finish. With the first side of the stud rounded, rotate the stud 180 degrees and round-over the other side.The next step in the process is to run the 2×4 through a table saw to cut off the pieces that will be the quarter-round. This should be repeated for both sides of the stud so you end up with two pieces of moulding and a square piece of stock left over that you will use for the third piece.This sounds very simple; however, it took me about half an hour of experimenting to perfect my technique. The first problem I encountered was that the blade on a table saw usually eats up nearly 1/4 in. of whatever it’s cutting into.
Trying to align the blade at the exact edge of the top of the curve of the quarter-round without the blade eating into the curve or leaving too much waste on the backside, took a lot of trial and error. I finally determined that if I set my fence so it was 24mm from the blade (the measuring strip on my bench saw is in 1/4-in. intervals and, in this case, the metric measurements were more exact), that it would take off just what was needed and leave a very thin strip of waste along the top edge of the quarter-round. My friend Hugh Morton down at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina is a wonderful nature photographer and he just sent me this photo of one of the bears at the park down there. Now I was going to take this down to a frame shop and have it professionally framed. And then I thought, you know what, this is a perfect workshop project -- custom making a frame. So that's exactly what we're going to do right over here at the workbench. So come on over. We're going to build our frame out of poplar.
I picked this up at the local home improvement center, and we'll be using three different thicknesses -- 3/4 inch, 1/2 inch and 1/4 inch. So the first thing I want to do is rip this down to the proper width. Now to round over this piece of wood, we're going to use this router bit called a roundover bit. It will mount into the router like this and the router in turn is held in this router table. Now come on under here and take a look. This is just a standard router clamped upside down. Now normally with a router, you move the router over the work, but when you're using a router table, you're passing the work over the router. Now this is going to form the base of our molding, our picture frame, if you will. And what we're going to do next is we're going to stack on top of this, just a smaller piece of lumber. This is the 1/2 inch thick. It's going to go right on top, just like that. I'll just put some glue on the bottom. Now, I want to get this nice and evenly spread out.
So we'll take a glue spreader and just kind of paint this on here. So what we end up with is a nice even film of glue. Now we'll take this, plop it right on top of that piece that we just finished routing there. I'm going to make it flush with the back. Then we'll take some spring clamps, put one of these every few inches. This is the last one right here. Now we'll set this one aside to dry and we'll do up a few more, just like this. Well, the glue's dried, the clamps are off, here's that piece that we attached. Now this is what I want to do next. Remove this little piece of material right in here. It's going to actually create kind of an S-curve. And to do that, we're going to use this core box bit. You can see right there how that's going to work. That's going to remove this material. Now see what a graceful S-curve that makes? Now I've installed a straight bit on the router and I'm cutting out a rabbit or a recess on the back side of the frame. This notch will hold the glass and photograph in place, and conceal the edges.
Well, this is the third piece of board in our sort of molding sandwich, if you will. This is going to sit right on the top. And what I want to do is to create a rounded edge on this. So I've set up our router table once again for our final routing. This is a little round-over bit in here. Now this is a very thin piece of wood, so I've added a couple of blocks here and here to hold this in position, keep it from chattering and allow me to keep my fingers well away from the blade. Let's go ahead and run this through twice --once in this direction, then we'll flip it over and run it through the other direction. See how the round shape is carried around the entire edge? Well, now we're ready to glue our third piece of molding on top of our stack of moldings, if you will, to give us a very interesting profile right here. So let's do the same thing we did before. We'll take some glue -- Well, here's our molding. A very nice looking profile we've got right here. Now I need to cut angles or miters on the ends of each section.
To do that more accurately, I'm using the miter gauge for the table saw, to which I've attached a wood strip as an extension. I'm also using a stop block to make sure the sections on opposite sides of the frame are exactly the same length. Finally, we have some finished frame parts right here. We're going to glue these together right now. And I've made up a simple gluing jig right here with a piece of particle board or MDF and then on top of that, a square -- I made sure that this was exactly square just screwed in place, just a few inches in from the edge. So what we're going to do is take our molding, put a little glue on the end of the miter cut here -- I've got a pretty generous coat of glue on this. Because this is end grain, it tends to soak the glue up. Now we'll take this piece, lay it up against the block, take the adjoining piece, lay it up against that edge and then push these two together. Now you see what the block does? The block makes certain that we have a 98-degree angle here.
We're adding the pin nailer here and I'm going to nail this first from this side -- and then from this side over here, and this one, and then we're just going to repeat the process. And folks, we have got a frame. Pretty as a picture, huh? And how about this portrait? Well, I've put some stain and a couple of coats of varnish on this and I'd say it's time to make this picture perfect. So we're going to take a piece of glass first of all, and drop this right into that rabbit that we cut earlier -- get it in there and here's our photograph. Put a mat around the outside edge of that, drop that right on top of the glass just like so. We'll hold the photo, mat and glass into the rabbit we cut earlier, with these glazier's points, used by glass installers to hold windowpanes in place. To protect the back and keep dust out, we'll attach a sheet of brown craft paper with masking tape. Well, there it is. You know, making your own frame can add a very personalized touch to something that's special to you.