How To Cut and Install Crown Molding - WOOD magazine

[Music] at one time or another you probably walk through a model home and seen the rooms trimmed and crown molding or maybe you've seen crown molding over the tops of the kitchen cabinets and you've wondered how hard that would be to do it in your own home well it's actually fairly easy I'm Jim heavy from wood magazine and I'm gonna show you a few simple techniques that will have you what your miter saw in no time first let's look at the crown molding itself now crown molding comes in a variety of species and also different widths the first one here is a piece of three-and-a-half inch crown molding pretty much standard the kind of thing that you can find at home improvement stores and the like this one's made out of poplar here's another crown piece made out of cherry a much nicer wood this is out of oak the slightly different profile at the bottom edge this is a two-part piece of trim this first part of crown is put up and then the dental mold is attached afterwards it looks really nice in some of the period homes and here's a piece of crown molding that's much bigger now these all look a little bit different but they all have one thing in common and those are the angles milled into the back of the molding the bottom edge which rests up against the wall tilts into the room at 38 degrees not 45 the top edge touches a ceiling at 52 degrees again not 45 it's these rather unique angles that can complicate your cutting so what you have to do is go to your miter saw and make adjustments of this off to either stand the molding up and cut it in the same plane that it would sit at the wall or adjust the angles on that saw and cut the crown molding flat and that's at the heart of this video there are a variety of manufacturer digs and some that you can make on your own they hope you cut crown molding on the saw on the manufacture jigs some are metal brackets that come off the front to help you prop up that trim on the plastic jigs they work off both the left on the right hand side that help stabilize that piece and lastly we've made them out of plywood that have just a wooden board across the front again that helps stabilize that piece of trim but in all cases they're taking a trim and they're taking in the top edge here and putting that on the bottom and putting a bottom edge up against the fence in the trades we call this cutting the trim upside down and backwards and the problems that always arise are cutting and stabilizing very long pieces real wide pieces and finally real small ones the second method is one that I use instead of propping up the trim on the saw I adjust the angles on the saw and cut that trim flat and a closer look at the miter saw will show you how easy that is now if you take a look at the miter scale you're gonna see a grouping of numbers next to zero fifteen degrees twenty two and a half and forty five are positive stops called detents they're set at the normal common angles but there's another one between twenty two and a half and forty five that you may not realize what it's there for thirty-one point six degrees in this case there's a positive stop there too it may be noted by a positive stop a thicker line may be the mark called cm but thirty-one point six degrees is the miter setting for cutting crown molding on your Meyer saw now let's look at the bevel on the back of this saw there's a scale it goes from zero to forty five so it has a positive stop at zero and at 45 but if you look between those two values there's another little mark in this case a small little arrow set at thirty three point nine degrees thirty three point nine is the bevel setting for cutting crown molding flat on your saw the settings of thirty three point nine on the bevel and thirty-one point six and the miter are stamped into the saw to eliminate the calculations it would take to cut trim at ninety degrees when it sits away from the wall at 38 degrees laying trim flat on the saw also makes it much easier to stabilize long pieces it's much easier to cut wider pieces that may not be able to stand up in a prop jig and lastly the trim can be clamped here pretty easily making cutting off small pieces much easier to make the process of cutting crown molding flat on the miter saw all but mistake proof I'm going to show you how to make a set of templates that make positioning really easy I'll also show you how to use those during the positioning part of this demonstration before we do that though want to make a couple of checks on the miter saw to make sure that we're plumb and square now what you'll need to check plumb and square is a machinist square like this and also a plastic triangle first thing I want to do is make sure that the blade is at 90 degrees to the table so to do that just take my square and lay it on the table and up against the blade and make sure that I'm ninety degrees and in this case I am while the blade is still locked down I can take my plastic triangle and put it up against the fence and make sure that it's 90 degree leg lays even with the blade and it does now if you're find your blade is not 90 degrees to the fence check your owners manual to find out where the adjustment points are and make those adjustments before you start start you'll just need a three-foot piece of crown I've marked this in the middle already what I'm gonna do is just cut the first thing now you've got two pieces on one of those pieces take a magic marker like this and mark the top edge now remember most of the ornamentation on crown molding is normally towards the bottom so we're gonna take a magic marker and just mark the top edge on one piece of crown like this on the other piece of crown I'm going to take that same marker but in this case mark the crown on the bottom edge let's start with the one on the top first we're gonna press that up against the back because the black mark always goes up against the fence I want to tilt my bevel to 33.9 and I'm going to slide my miter in this case towards me @ 31.6 and all I'm going to do now is cut this piece of trim in half [Music] now you have no idea what you've just made but let's set these off to the side and take the other piece of crown and cut it and remember this is the one with the black mark on the bottom of the trim the black mark always goes up against the fence we're leaving the bevel setting at 33.9 and since we had the miter gauge set on my side last time we're gonna slide it to the other side @ 31.6 this time and we're gonna cut that in half so here's how we do it and now to mark these here your four pieces find your two outside corners in this case this is what we have this would be our left outside corner this would be our right outside corner so let's mark this one first this would be our left outside corner and this then of course would be our right outside corner here's our inside corners this is the way they'd be sitting in the wall so in this case we have our left inside corner and this is our right inside corner so let's take the left again and mark left inside corner and lastly right inside corner now what you've created is a full set of templates these will help you position your trim on the saw and will also be used for the installation process let me show you how this works here is a right inside corner and if you notice in this case the mark is on the bottom side of the trim that always goes up against the fence my bevel setting stays at 33.9 and in this case you can see I have to rotate the miter setting to the left side and there's my cut and replacing this with the new trim said at the same orientation will allow me to cut that trim perfectly now let's just say we're gonna create a right outside corner that's marked on the back again mark is on the top edge that black mark always goes up against the fence bevel stays at 33.9 in this case we have to rotate the trim to 31.6 on this side you'll notice the depth is the correct cut you should never place your trim on the saw incorrectly now that you've got these templates let's talk about some real-life crown molding now let's review the placing of crown molding in a typical room the way I like to do it is the wall that I start crowning first is the wall opposite the door that I walk into I've made a small little cutout here using some relatively standard construction practices to make this a little bit easier this is the chrome we're going to be using this is three and a half inch crown molding and I want to measure where this is going to drop onto the wall around the room and this is how I do it take this piece of crown molding and set it up against the wall flat and slide it until it touches a ceiling so in this case we're lying flat here and it's touch up against the ceiling and put a small pencil mark in that spot now take a measurement and see how far that petal mark comes and worried about two and three quarters of an inch I want to replicate that same mark all the way around the room make it a little easier I'm just gonna use an adjustable square that was a two and three-quarters of an inch so I'm going to set my square at two and three quarters of an inch and by placing this all the way around the room I'm just kind of police pencil marks all the way around now I'm putting pencil marks in here because they don't want to use a chalk line you would think a chalk line to be a good idea and it will provide a nice straight line but you'll never get that chalk out of the paint when you paint so pencil line works really well and I want you to do one more thing take some small finishing nails like these these are for penny finishing nails and every place that you put a pencil mark I want you to put a nail and it only needs to go into the drywall what this pencil line is going to do is establish the place where the trim is going to sit and it's also going to make it much easier for you to support your tape measure when you're measuring around the room we've established where the trim is going to sit the object now is to start putting trim on this first wall so take your two pieces of trim these inside corners these are the ones that you made not long ago so we put them like this this is how they're gonna go on the wall the first piece of trim that you want to put on this wall would be your right inside corner that's this piece of trim that's also marked right inside corner what you're gonna do now is take this to your miter saw and I'll show you how to cut your first piece of trim there now this is our piece of trim remember it was our right inside corner here's our mark that mark always goes up against the fence in this case it's at the bottom of the trim so that's how it fits we have to now align the saw so I'm going to tilt the bevel to 33.9 and wherever we're doing 90-degree corners the bevel always stays there and you'll notice that what we've got to do is slide the miter to the left to match the cut so this is exactly how the saw needs to be set up I take my clean piece of trim my new one and as long as I match that trim the same way on the fence again bottom side up against the fence I know that it's positioned correctly so I'll slide this all the way to one end and make my cut now I'm fairly comfortable holding the trim in this spot but if you're not the nice part about using the miter saw flat is that you can use a clamp like this to hold it so now that I've got a position correctly let's cut the trim now we've made that first cut on this end and now it's important to make this cut again looking at your two sample pieces this would be the corner you're cutting this case it's the left inside corner but I need to know what the measurement is across this a lot of people would use a tape measure and I'm not a real big tape measure fan and I'll explain why when you've put the tape in one corner you have to press it up into the other one and kind of guess where that tape is going to make the fold it can make it sometimes a little tough especially when you're measuring exact edges I'm a big believer in the old folding rules by taking a folding rule like this and sliding it up against one edge until it touches and extending the slide on the opposite side I can look and I have 31 inches here I have an inch and a sixteenth on the outside so I have 32 and a sixteenth of an inch it makes it really easy to measure and now that I know they have I can take this piece of trim and on it mark 32 and a sixteenth of an inch now to that trim I'm going to add 1/32 of an inch I just like to put a little Plus on there so it kind of reminds me now here's the template for the other side of the wall this is our left inside corner and in this case the mark is at the top of the trim so I want to do is position my saw to make that cut we've left the bevel at 33.9 and you'll notice with the trim up against the fence I have to slide the miter around the opposite side so that this is the new cut and by taking my piece of trim we've already cut putting it back on this saw in the same direction the first one was on there I'm all ready to make the cut and I need to know now where the mark is going to be the nice part is that at the wall you mark this template with 32 inches and a sixteenth of an inch and again I like to add about 1/32 of an inch just to provide a little tension on that cut now that I've got it here I measure from the outside end that I previously cut to the position on the trim here where the new cuts going to be made and I have all of it done for me it really makes using these templates simple so we have 32 and 1/16 of an inch on my folding rule I set one edge to the end of the trim like this I bring this out at 32 and 1/16 right here and I want to add about 1/32 of an inch so there's my line now when you make this cut sometimes hard to visualize about where that blade is going to come in and impact the trim so my suggestion here is that you cut that a little bit fat to start with that way after you've cut it you can kind of see how much you have to move it after you've used this off for a while you get a little bit more comfortable in making these cuts so let's make this first one and we'll see where we are and now we're showing us that were fat I know what I'll do is scoot it over and make another now I've got our piece cut it's time to go fit it on the wall and I've got our piece cut let's get it in the opening here see how it sits on these nails nicely this fits pretty well normally I like to have this piece nice and tight on a longer wall I would have fitted one corner pulled a piece of trim out a little bit to allow the other corner to go in and when I push it in it snaps in and actually holds it real well it's a little bit tough to recreate on this small little cutaway but you've got the idea here now let's put a couple of nails in here to hold this together now you probably notice that I didn't look for studs when I was nailing that piece of trim up there before when you're using three and a half inch trim like this to be honest you really don't have to and let me show you why on this cutaway I'm gonna put a piece of trim like this up in the corner and you'll see how it sits on the wall if I put a nail up through the corner this is which which is what I did the nail goes into a double two-by-four on the ends this is standard construction you have two by four studs like this and you have double two by fours all the way around the room over every door and every window so by nailing through this corner the nails will penetrate those studs every place it's perfect the only place that you won't have that ability is when you're doing bigger trim like this when some of these get really large a piece of trim sitting like this a nail through this corner has an open awful lot of area between here and the wood stud you may not be able to find a place to get a good purchase so you may have to look for the vertical studs in this case or provide a batten strip a little wood batting all the way around the room to give you a little bit more wood surface area behind this piece of trim and lastly as long as we're talking about it there's no need to nail up at the top of that trim in fact in many cases you're going to find that the roof rafters or the ceiling joists are running parallel to those two walls so there's nothing to nail to the nails that you put in this edge will pull that piece of trim up nice and tight and whatever irregularity you find there are gonna be covered by clock anyway now that we've got the first piece up on the wall it's time to continue both other walls I'll start on this side you're taking your same pieces of trim like this this is the piece you want to cut we're gonna go back to our miter saw again and do right inside corner the bottom edge goes up against the saw just the same way that we did and once you've cut it this is how that piece of trim is going to sit up in that corner we'll repeat the same thing for the other side and as you walk around the walls that's how you finish this now you've got all your trim nailed up it's time to remove these positioning nails like this and don't worry about the holes that are in there they're gonna be covered by caulk in fact I like to caulk these because as the studs and rafters have a tendency to push the drywall or plaster away you get some unevenness between the edge of this trim and the ceiling and Clark takes up for that a small tip of a clock is plenty don't really cut it back I'm gonna put a small bead between the wall on the bottom of the trim like this and do the same at the opposite end I'd like to try and do about as much as I can reach when I'm sitting on a ladder and then clean up that trim I like to keep a little pail of water there wet my fingers and just push that clock right into the openings now also while you're here any of the excess caulk here before you wipe it off you can take that and then put that and each one of those little nail holes as you work your way around the room nail holes if they're fairly deep may dry a little bit and pull some of that caulk in you may have to go back and touch it up but it's a great way to work your way around the room and provide a great surface after which you're going to paint just a perfect way to put cock-up and trim now here's another way to install crown molding we're gonna put that first piece up on the back wall exactly the way we did before but instead of mitering the corners we're gonna flush cut them so we'll fit them at both ends spring fit them in and put the nails in when we go to place this corner we again go back to our templates so we're looking at right inside corner instead of mitering this corner to go in the in the edge we're gonna actually cope this corner this then Nestle's on to the first piece of trim instead of mitering up next to it this is the method that professionals use to do crown molding and the reason that they use it is that most corners are not ninety degrees there's some variance of that and by putting a piece of trim that's been coked-up to the square edge of a piece of trim you'll find that you've got a little bit of room there to go between 89 and say 91 degrees and the process is really easy we're still going to use this same piece of trim this is still right inside corner we're still going to miter it at the same way on the miter saw but in this case we're going to use a coping saw and trim this piece of material off and back cut it let me show you how that's done now here's this edge we want to remove and I'm going to do that with the coping saw to make this edge a little bit easier to visualize one of the ways to do it is just take a pencil like this and you can kind of scribe out the edge with a little pencil line makes it easier to visualize and now to do this this is how many use the coping saw I'm gonna use a coping saw to remove the fat part of this trim but I don't want the cut to be straight up and down I actually want to angle a saw just a little bit to the back this gives me a little bit more room to play so here's how you cut it [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] let's just see how this piece works here is how that cope joints fits into the corner now you can always tweak this joint with either four in one file like this or maybe the blade from a razor knife until you're happy with the fit but most people would be pretty happy with the way that that fits the more comfortable you become at cutting crown molding the less daunting some of these angles will be in this small mock-up we're suggesting that maybe the ends here go around the pilasters around a fireplace and you'll notice that these are just a series of inside and outside corners the real problem it seems would be cutting something this small when you look at it that little edge is just a series of outside corners with an inside corner on the other side so really when you look at it this piece is one that I want to make 3/4 of an inch wide and that will transition from this edge to the other one it's a lot easier than your think let's go to the miter saw and I'll show you how to do it now here's that piece we're gonna cut this is left outside corner again here's our mark that always goes up against the fence I'm already set at 33 9 I'm going to slide my miter over to 31 6 on the other side and that is the cut for this and as long as I've got it there I'm just going to slide this piece of trim up until it touches the saw blade body and then I'm gonna leave it there now I want to make this piece three-quarters of an inch long normally the backs of these you may find them they have indexing scales on them this doesn't have anything so let's make one of our own when I put a pencil line on this piece of trim and I'm going to extend that pencil line up the backside because I want to cut a piece off that's 3/4 of an inch I'm going to extend the pencil line I just wrote there to 3/4 here and I want to put another line 1/8 of an inch away from that so here's how this works I'm going to take our original lines and I'm going to slide my piece closer to the blade to that 3/4 inch mark and because I know that this is 1/8 to the ninj blade I'm gonna put it in 8 of an inch closer when I cut this piece of trim because it's laying flat watch what happens to this piece that piece stayed right there it's a great way to cut trim now while I'm holding this prop let's talk about one more trick with crown molding let's just say you have a wall that either ends into another room or goes up a set of stairs where you don't want to continue the crown it's real easy to stop the crown there and rather than put a small block in put a small piece of that crown that forms a nice close the way to do that is if we look at this prop is this is our outside corner by taking the mating outside corner and setting up your miter saw to cut it just at 90 degrees from the bottom up you'll provide a piece that slips perfectly into the den providing a beautiful close to the crown [Music] you now let's installing outside corner you've got your two templates they're already marked left outside corner right and they've got the appropriate markings your miter saw and you're gonna cut them the same way but when you place them on the corners there's were a little difference is I want you to place these and glue them so that they fit at 90 degrees don't try and make adjustments for the fact that the corner is not exactly square and here's why with your framing and drywall work the corner is nice and square but as we add the bead and the mud that forms that corner you're gonna find that those corners normally aren't square once you get past the edge of that mud they are again it's very hard to cut miters that have that kind of sweep embedded into them so the suggestion is put your writers together at 90 set your nails way back from that corner and just glue these together after this all sets in the glue is dried wall you can sneak nails in a little bit closer and any irregularities on the other side are gonna be taking care of light by caulk just like we talked about before and lastly resist the urge to put a nail in the side the whole East piece as a trim together in many cases it may work but ultimately you're gonna have a nail that blows out through the side of the trim trying to friction that off the dents and the holes it creates are just not worth it glue the joint together keep the nails away from the outside until the glue sets up well sneak your nails a little closer and use your clock to take up those irregularities you'll love a beautiful 90-degree corner and no one will see it now let's talk about corners that are not ninety degrees for a reason here's our 90-degree corner but let's just say in your kitchen the wall moves out to go around a bay window or maybe around a refrigerator cabinet and let's just say that wall moves out like this we're gonna take this little angle finder and lock it in place to show where that angle is and by looking at this will see it says 135 degrees you're still going to use your templates to cut that edge so in effect these have bridged off this way I'm still planning in this case to wrote to do a right outside corner let's go to the miter saw and I'll show you how to set this up this is our piece of right outside corner what we're going to do is put this on the saw the same way we normally would the mark is at the top of this petal up against the fence now the markings here at 33.9 and 31-6 would normally have cut this at a 90 but that angle if you remember has been changed to 135 so what I'm going to do is change those two markings to be able to cut this piece of trim so that when it sits on the wall it sits at a hundred and thirty five degree angle to get those measurements all you need to do is google crown molding angles there are a number of sites that will show you differences and angles between 67 degrees and 180 in this particular case if I look at 135 I see that our miter setting is at 14 point 3 and our bevel setting is at 17.5 here's how this is done now we originally started with 33.9 I'm just going to tighten this to seventeen point five all right about here and I'm going to take our miter bevel setting that was at thirty one point six and I'm going to move that to fourteen point three and here it is there now again get as close as you can and all that the markings aren't that distinct this piece of trim will show you where to place the fresh one place your fresh piece of trim in this case with the top edge up against the fence and cut it that resulting cut will provide when sitting at 38 degrees 135 degree angle it's just that easy well now you've learned all the techniques it takes to install crown molding and you've seen how templates will let you place that crown molding on your miter saw with no problem at all and you've seen how cutting crown molding flat will make stabilizing long pieces cutting real wide pieces or real short pieces really easy now you're not going to generate much scrap but you are gonna generate some there's a project I made out of scrap material let your mind wonder with a number of things that you can make now go out and crown [Music]

Channel: WOOD magazine

Views: 43,616

Rating: 4.8993378 out of 5

Keywords: WOOD magazine, woodworking, how-to, project, plan, carpentry, tool, technique, review, table, saw, band, miter, cabinetry, cabinet, making, make, build, mitersaw, crown, molding, crown molding, trim, perfect, gapless, tight, install, installation, cope, coping, professional, professionally, installed, math, mathmatical, angle, angles, tips, tricks, pointers

Id: zCWQlM-e-NY

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2019