Traditional Architrave Replication

[Notch7]

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

Ive done hundreds of moulding copies over the years -and the reality is almost every new enquiry doesnt match any cutters.


A set of small cutters with limiters for a universal 2 pin block costs about £100
A set of cutters and limiters for a serrated knife block is more like £200

Workshop rate I charged at £40/hour -so a small job of a few metres would be charged at an hour plus cutters, then material.

no joinery shop would entertain faffing around with routers or handtools -a cutter set means a job can on a spindle with a 10 minute or so set up -prob no more than an hour set up with special support fences or jogs being made.

 

[JohnD]

I used to live in a district of London where thousands of houses had been knocked up in waves. There was a local timber yard that would accumulate requests from local homeowners wishing to "restore original features" and would occasionally set up the spindle cutter and make a batch of skirting or whatever. A one-off order was charged a lot more as it had to cover set-up. There was also a lot of skip-diving.

Victorian and 20th Century housebuilders also used factory-made mouldings, and the same builder in the same district would tend to keep buying the same pattern.