Duplicating Molding Profiles for profit

[toymaker]

Hello
This is funny, I just did the same thing the other day, and came to the same conclusion- it´s a great niche. I made it in Surfcam though, it´s a bit complicated so I hope I can afford Aspire soooon...

Christer
http://www.kyltti.fi

[Bob_S]

I just had a thought, unusual for a Saturday morning,
to make it easier when trying to accurately photograph the end of a molding, try the following:

Slice off a fairly thin section at 90 degrees on a chop saw
lay it on your scanner
a quick scan and either work on it in an imaging program to make a B&W or hi contrast conversion, or take it right into Aspire as is.
the geometry of this image should be absolutely perfect

getting a camera set at exactly 90 degrees to a small part is difficult, but it is simple to use a scanner and a chop saw

[tmerrill]

That's an excellent idea Bob!

If I had taken that approach I'm sure it would have saved considerable time. I still have the profile samples I made and will give that a try later. I'm pretty sure my scanner (HP) has both black and white and greyscale scan modes.

Thanks for sharing,

Tim

[dealguy11]

You can also use these techniques for cutting molding disks to go on the top and bottom of columns if you have an indexer. We just completed about 24 of these for a customer to match the moldings on a set of vanities the customer was making. In our case, the customer had a plastic cutout of the molding patterns and we were able to take photos of the cutouts, and used the jpg files to create the profiles as described by Tim and others. We also used 3D techniques with a ballnose bit, and added a couple of profile passes to duplicate flat areas of the molding profiles with a 1/4" end mill. Depending on the profiles (we duplicated 3) the disks took from 9 minutes to 30 minutes each to cut. The photo below shows the disks for one of the vanities plus some of the other pieces we cut.

[myozman]

I have also done some arch profiles in the past. I have had luck in finding common profiles online that I can import, or if custom, I have drawn in autocad and imported as vector. I wish I could come up with a faster way to cut though.

Mike

[Robatoy]

Excellent! Thank you for sharing. Intuitively I always felt that the 2-rail sweep could yield those quality results. I will now give it a try.