How To Make Perfect Baseboard Cope Joints!

besides the birth of your first child is there anything more magical and satisfying than a perfectly coped molding joint so i'm going to show you the easiest cheapest way to get perfect cope joints on your baseboards then we'll talk about whether or not the cope joint on the inside corners is actually better than just mitering the baseboards together and which method is going to be best for you and then i'll let you know which method i end up using over 90 percent of the time i think the answer is gonna surprise you before we get it into the cutting of the cope joint it's important to understand the layout of how the pieces go together that's a critical part and if you mess it up it's gonna be a lot harder and slower so what you wanna do here is for baseboards in a given room you want to start at the doorway and if you're right-handed i like to work counter-clockwise it just makes sense in terms of stud finder nail gun pushing the baseboard in with your left hand and what that ends up doing here is you start off with a square square piece and then all of your cope joints are going to be on the right side of the baseboard and then all the other left-hand sides are going to be square that does a couple things it just makes it easier in that you can push the cope into the baseboard and then slide the square edge into the wall and it eliminates the need to have like a cope on both sides of the piece that you have to fit in between two baseboards what can happen there is the coped edge is prone to chipping so you don't really want to be pushing it in like this it's always nicer to set it in there and then push the square edge in as you're measuring these pieces you'll need a little scrap piece of baseboard just slide that in there and that will give you the measurement to the square end and where the coat butts in so you just go like that all the way around the first step here for your cope joint is to cut a 45 on the right hand side if you're working counterclockwise so i'm going to cut that with the miter saw now if you're just starting off with cope joints it is easy to make a mistake when you're back cutting this so you might want to leave your cut like an inch long give yourself a little bit of room get the coke joint looking nice test fit it and then cut it to length [Music] so we've got that cut on the 45 what that does is it just reveals the profile exactly where you need to back cut that to get the perfect fitting joint now there's a couple little cheats that you can do here you can just start working on this with the coping sauce straight away and if you have a long baseboard and you don't have a nice table i don't really recommend doing what i'm about to do here but if you do and you're pretty comfortable with the miter saw there's a couple little cheats that you can do you can go ahead and cut this straight flat part here on the miter on the miter saw so i'm going to cut that back at 30 degrees which is going to leave a nice little back cut so the piece can fit tight you can do 45 degrees but i find it makes the edge a little sharper and more prone to chipping so i like to do like 30 35 degrees usually i do 35 and then you can also right where this curve ends at the very top so the curve ends right there from that point on you can cut a nice little square cut on the miter saw there and that's just going to give a little cleaner of an edge than what you could do with a coping saw so i'll make those cuts [Music] so when it comes to actually making the cut you're going to need something to do that you can use a coping saw an angle grinder or a collins foot for your jigsaw the easiest one is going to be the coping saw the other two there's a bit more of a learning curve and it's a lot easier to mess things up they definitely have their advantages but this is going to be the cheapest easiest way you can get this saw here this is the backhoe 301 it's kind of an industry standard for coping saws very nice handle on this thing that's what i like about it i think it's 25 canadian i'll put a link in the description then you're going to need some kind of a sandpaper you can you can get different types of wood files as well but you can get by with just a sheet of sandpaper 150 grit so to the cutting take your saw now it's nice to be cutting you can switch these blades around to be cutting on the down stroke that way it's going to be less likely to chip the face of the board and you want to just follow along at that same type of 35 degree angle giving yourself a little bit of a back cut it's going to be easier to fit the joint together that way and then when you get to the end here you want to be careful that you don't cut that back cut all the way through the top edge you want to leave this part here square so that it's going to butt in nicely so yeah you can see i cut pretty dang close there actually there's not going to be a lot of sanding you can just take a little piece and roll up a curve i got like a little small curved piece here and then this here can do kind of both curves so just take that and then rather than stick at the 35 you just flatten it out a little bit and then you're just sanding you don't want to go straight up and down but just flatten it out a bit it's going to make it sand a little quicker let's check that with a scrap piece so is the cope joint actually that much better than just mitering the inside corners on your baseboards it's actually considerably better because you end up avoiding a lot of the inherent problems that you have with an inside miter if one piece is slightly too short it's going to be open like that one piece is slightly too long it'll be open the other way it could be open on the top could be open on the bottom edge and then as well if the wall is more than 90 degrees it's going to be open along the entire face so you end up avoiding a lot of those problems with the cope joint that being said in my career over 90 percent of the time i've just mitered the inside corners that's the way that i was taught when i was young and it is slightly faster but if i had to go back in time i think that i would just stick with the cope joint it's hard to ignore the difference in quality so i highly recommend on your next baseboard job try two or three of the joints see how you like it and hey if you're in the market for a new miter saw check out this video right over here you might not need to spend as much money as you think thanks a lot for watching we'll see you on the next video

Channel: The Funny Carpenter

Views: 329,195

Keywords: how to cope baseboards, baseboard tips, baseboard tricks, best way to join baseboards, the funny carpenter, funny carpenter, coping vs mitering

Id: -aRVyaqNpmU

Length: 6min 46sec (406 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021