Traditional Architrave Replication

[KieranOL]

Hi,

My wife and I are renovating a tenement flat in Edinburgh. The building was built in 1897 and has some beautiful original features, along with some awful 1960s features!

We'd like to keep the original architraves but a few of them are in poor shape and we'll be short a few metres for a new door that we're adding anyway.

As such, we'd like to replicate the original architrave. Who would be best placed to help us with this? Would a decent joiner be able to do it? Or a local wood merchant? Or somebody else entirely?

It doesn't need to be local to Edinburgh but of course that would makes things easier for us if it could be done locally.

Thanks,
Kieran

 

[Deleted member 174758]

You may struggle to find a match. To give you an idea, the Alexander Mathieson catalogue of 1900 had hundreds of architrave profiles for their hand planes

Running a few metres or a hundred metres of architrave means making up a set of (probably bespoke) spindle moulder cutters, something which can easily cost £80 to £200 for the cutter set alone depending on the complexity and size - and that's before you prepare the timber, set up the spindle moulder and actually run the mouldings

If all your architraves are the same you may want to strip the architraves from one room, say a bathroom or a store cupboard, and replace them with a modern, off-the shelf design, using the recovered material to do repair work elsewhere

Another approach might be to see if the individual elements of the design,such as covers, goes, books, etc can be bought-in as pre-manufactured beadings and to build up your own composite architrave that way. Whilst unlikely, this sometimes does work

 

[Tigercubrider]

"A few metres" would be expensive so another option is to skip dive locally or flyer the local properties asking that if people are renovating that you'd appreciate a ring.

I am sure I saw an advert or mention of a bespoke system that claimed to be able to do "affordable" replicas.

Timber or mdf? It might be easier to get mdf made in a profile compared to genuine timber? Not my area.

 

[KenGMac]

Back in the day [1897] it was not uncommon to find that the Architraves and Skirting s would "vary" from flat to flat.in the one three story tenement ?

And depending on market pressures, the number of bedrooms would vary from tenement to tenement even in the one street.

i worked in many areas of Edinburgh and can recall that on a Government owned property in Coats Crescent [West end] the what was the old "Cookery School" as it was Morphed into a Civil Service College [I do not know if it still exists?? ] the Architraves and Skirting s varied property to property.

Suggest that you do a local to you WWW check to see if there is a firm that can assist, a possible start point could be Sash window makers, these guys should have some "contacts"

As the posts above you can see the problems in running even a few meters of a specific profile.

Ken.

 

[KenGMac]

I wonder if this is a nice little earner?

Set up an on line Bespoke [say] 30 / 40 / 50 M of a specific profile in timber or MDF??

???

 

[Deleted member 174758]

When I started in the business, Ken, we were still allowed to use French heads, square blocks, Whitehill blocks and slotted collars on spindle moulders. The 1974 regulations banned most of them (not a surprise, really, as spindle moulders had a fearsome reputation as "finger eaters" and the wood machinists of the era were often missing fingers, or at least a finger joint or two!) - in general the ones banned were types where the cutter could not be locked on place so that is the holding bolt failed the cutter would not turn into a lethal projectile

I never used slotted collars (gladly, as they too readily spat out cutters if inadequately tightened down), but we did have a French head spindle moulder which was specifically used to do one off runs of 20 or 30ft of material such as the OP requires. The knives were cheap to make and fast, but you couldn't make wide profiles with them, they really did go off after 20 to 30ft of running because they were made from low grade carbon steel (HSS requires hardening) and because of the fact that they work with a scraping action they couldn't be used on softwoods - only hardwoods.

Larger/wider mouldings were generally run on a square block, either in the spindle moulder or the thicknesser (older thicknessers either had square cutter blocks or a round block with a removable sections at one end of the block). These are a bit more time consuming to grind as you need to do an ortho graphic projection to work out the actual grinding profile, but they cut beautifully, were available in HSS (and by the 1970s you could even get carbide Tipped cutters) and wide compound profiles such as architraves could be made using a combination of up the six profile sets on a single block. They too were prone to he holding bolts failing causing cutters to be launched. We must have had several thiusand pairs if these, all held in large chests which looked like heavy duty plan chests. When these were banned the while lot got dumped into a skip and went for scrap. A lot of other workshops did the same in the mid to late 1970s.

Whitehill blocks were another "grind your own" solution, and did last a bit longer, in fact until.the 1990s when they changed the regs yet again to make limited tooling mandatory. Whitehills suffered from the jaws spreading which in due course would result in cutter ejection or cutter block failure

So that leaves us with modern limited cutter blocks. They are very much safer to use, but require a special purpose grinding machine to produce both a pair of matching cutters and a pair of matching limited. This is expensive in materials and manpower. Hence the high cost of bespoke cutters, making a low cost business doing short runs all but impossible to do - legally - and is why there just aren't such services. I have done listed buildings where the budget is there to have one offs made, but even there we often try to build-up larger mouldings by using smaller standard beads attached to a backer board

Sorry for the long post, but this is a topic which has come up a number of times over the years and where even some people in the trade don't understand the reason behind the problems in running one-offs

 

[^woody^]

Combi or moulding plane or a router if it's just a few.

That's the problem now with all the joiners shops and their production machines, they don't know how or are incapable of ad-hoc work or a small production run

 

[KieranOL]

Sorry for the long post, but this is a topic which has come up a number of times over the years and where even some people in the trade don't understand the reason behind the problems in running one-offs

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It's very useful to me and I'm sure to other people as well. I understood that there might be a cost implication for a short run but I couldn't really understand the hesitancy for somebody to have a go. I would have thought that it would be interesting work for a joiner but if it's too much hassle, it's understandable that people wouldn't be bothered. Cheers.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Combi or moulding plane or a router if it's just a few.

Well, if you are traditional enough to own a set of hollows rounds, plus a set of beading planes, plus a pair of quirk planes in addition to a plough plane and a decent bench plane or two plus a rebate plane and maybe a couple of spokeshave, then it is possible to reproduce many mouldings. But a big problem is that the colleges really stopped teaching about wooden planes in the 1950s (other than rounds and hollows they barely get a mention in mid-1960s City & Guilds texts, and the last wooden plane makers in the UK, William Marples, shut their wooden plane department in the mid 1960s). So there are now very few joiners who understand or are proficient with wooden planes. I've "knife and forked" short lengths of cornice on listed refurbs a number of times, but there is a world of difference between a couple of feet of built-up cornice that end up fixed 15 feet above the floor (and so won't be subject to close scrutiny) and which is painted to match existing 150 year old walls (I.e. without much finesse) but which will never be brightly lit - as opposed to 8ft of architrave, well lit and at or near eye level

As to a combi plane, etc. Certainly if you are doing back of house/servants quarters mouldings it might be enough, but in Scotland in particular the plane makers like Mathieson and Malloch had developed huge 2-, 3- and even 4-iron moulding planes by the late Victorisn period which a "modern" small combi plane, such as a Record #405 or Stanley #55, cannot reproduce

The problem now with all the joiners shops and their production machines, they don't know how or are incapable of ad-hoc work or a small production run

Well, surely it's more that the world has moved on and the ability to do some of this work, as we'd have done it at one time, has been legislated out of existence on grounds of safety. I used to love doing French head work, and also doing complex curved work on big square blocks with multiple cutters and saddle beds. It was challenging, but the fact is that people got injured all too easily on this sort of work. And unlike lizard tails fingers don't grow back once severed or mangled

Not having a go @^woody^, but genuinely sad that this aspect of the trade has been more or less killed off

 

[conny]

I think one of the other things that have killed off these sort of age old skills is peoples acceptance to use any modern day crap that designers throw at them.
Probably because they can be mass produced in a very short time and are, 'This years trend that will last a lifetime!'. (Whose lifetime though? ).

I'm always amazed when I look at an old building, (Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian etc), at how much detail they contain. Even simple things like dado rails or skirtings which have been cut in so they seem to just 'flow' around corners like one continuous piece. Unlike modern day things which are often butt jointed and packed with filler which often cracks and falls out after a time.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

I'm always amazed when I look at an old building, (Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian etc), at how much detail they contain. Even simple things like dado rails or skirtings which have been cut in so they seem to just 'flow' around corners like one continuous piece. Unlike modern day things which are often butt jointed and packed with filler which often cracks and falls out after a time.

In the last 6 years I've transitioned from doing mainly commercial interior fit-out (i.e bars, restaurants, hotels, etc) to doing mainly listed building work (both structural and finishing) precisely for those sort of reasons. The money isn't as good, but the work is infinitely more satisfying!

What i think you are talking about is spindle moulder ring fence work, which is still done, but architects seem to dislike it, possibly because it costs too much, or maybe it's just too awkward to draw it in CAD. Who knows? Even so you might be surprised to learn that even a lot of traditional stuff is just butted and bolted or dowelled and glued, etc and even what look like (hidden) blacksmith made brackets at times. The modern equivalents (other than dowels) might be those Hoffman dovetail keys which some better firms use, or Dominos, whilst on stair handrails there are some really nifty jointed fasteners these days for use when joining straight handrail sections to carved or ring fence and saddle worked parts such as goose necks and volutes

 

[^woody^]

Well, if you are traditional enough to own a set of hollows rounds, plus a set of beading planes, plus a pair of quirk planes in addition to a plough plane and a decent bench plane or two plus a rebate plane and maybe a couple of spokeshave, then it is possible to reproduce many mouldings. But a big problem is that the colleges really stopped teaching about wooden planes in the 1950s (other than rounds and hollows they barely get a mention in mid-1960s City & Guilds texts, and the last wooden plane makers in the UK, William Marples, shut their wooden plane department in the mid 1960s). So there are now very few joiners who understand or are proficient with wooden planes. I've "lnife and forked" short lengths of cornice on listed refurbs a number of times, but there is a world of difference between a couple of feet of built-up cornice that end up fixed 15 feet above the floor (and so won't be subject to close scrutiny) and which is painted to match existing 150 year old walls (I.e. without much finesse) but which will never be brightly lit - as opposed to 8ft of architrave, well lit and at or near eye level

As to a combi plane, etc. Certainly if you are doing back of house/servants quarters mouldings it might be enough, but in Scotland in particular the plane makers like Mathieson and Malloch had developed huge 2-, 3- and even 4-iron moulding planes by the late Victorisn period which a "modern" small combi plane, such as a Record #405 or Stanley #55, cannot reproduce


Well, surely it's more that the world has moved on and the ability to do some of this work, as we'd have done it at one time, has been legislated out of existence on grounds of safety. I used to love doing French head work, and also doing complex curved work on big square blocks with multiple cutters and saddle beds. It was challenging, but the fact is that people got injured all too easily on this sort of work. And unlike lizard tails fingers don't grow back once severed and mangled

Not having a go @^woody^, but genuinely sad that this aspect of the trade has been more or less killed off

We'd have to see the profile of the OP's architrave to see how hard it would be to replicate.

But on principle, for a typical profile it should not be too difficult for a small run, do these by hand or with a basic router set up. The thing is, lots of shops are now staffed by people who can only operate a machine, like a machine, and can't think or do anything non-standard. In which case I wonder if joiner's shops are the right place to be looking - perhaps the home enthusiast or hobbyist may be more appropriate?

 

[mrrusty]

have a look here https://www.skirting4u.co.uk/architrave they have a big range of styles and can supply in different widths. You might find something close.

Or perhaps you might find something here https://www.wrp-timber-mouldings.co.uk/moulding-profiles

 

[Notch7]

mainly listed building work (both structural and finishing) precisely for those sort of reasons

That's interesting - I owned a joinery company for 20 years and did loads of work on listed buildings, period houses etc.

I'm now helping a friend make 2 sliding sash bay windows on a listed building - it's on a house in Uckfield high street, so conservation officer has insisted on Single glazed.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

Well it's sort of a return to where I started out in terms of what I'm dealing with.