Below is my first attempt with a practice piece of soft maple. First of all it was only an 1 inch high, that is how I learned that the molding did not look good unless it was 1 1/8 inch high. Second, I learned to mark the back side of the molding first which is cut off of a larger board. It is really hard to mark out after routing out the pattern.
I milled a piece of 1 1/8 inch cherry board and marked out the shape with the template that I have been using for the bottom and drawer blades. You can see I marked the front and back of the molding shape on the board. I am now going to bandsaw just the front. Then flush trim the front to the template.
Here is the board after bandsawing, looks kind of rough. I have attached the template with screws in the waste area.
The flush trim bit has the bearing on the bottom, so the template is attached under the piece with screws.
One pass and it's all cleaned up, nice and smooth now.
Now I need to cut the cove in the board. I remove the template. I am using a core box bit with a 5/8 inch radius which matches the curve that I need to make. There is a lot of material to remove so I take multiple passes taking a little off each pass.
I marked a line 3/16 inch from the bottom of the board. This is where I want to stop. I just make light passes by raising the bit to sneak up to the line.
Next using a rabbeting bit with a large bearing, I cut a 3/16 inch deep x 1/8 inch wide rabbet along the top edge. I turned the board upside down for that operations. The bearing ran along the inside of the curved portion.
Now the molding was created, I need to rip it off of the board with the bandsaw following the other line I put on the board. I leave a little extra material and use a spindle sander to remove the excess and smooth the back of the molding. I tried to use a spoke shave but could not find a easy way to clamp the molding in a vise to work on it.
Here I am test fitting the molding to the front of the chest. It was pretty close but I did have to do some final fitting to get it to match the curve.
Now that I have the curved piece, I ripped the remainder of the board straight and repeated the process two more times to get two straight pieces of molding for the sides. It was much easier to do since there is no curve and I used the table saw to rip the molding off the board.
Next I needed to make the 1/2 inch piece of molding that the curved molding sits on and the bracket feet attach too.
It is a 1/2 inch piece of cherry that is 3 1/2 inches wide. It sticks out 1 inch from the front creating another step of 1/8 inch from the curved molding.
Now I was set to go with mitering the pieces together. I mitered the 1/2 inch piece first and glued it together with a spline in the corners to help hold it together.
Once the glued dried I attached it to the bottom of the chest with screws and elongated the last screw hole to allow for expansion of the chest since the molding is going cross grain at this point.
The rear two pieces are for the rear of the bracket feet and are not seen. They are screwed on flush with the back and with a floating spline between the two mating faces.
Then I mitered and attached the curved molding. It is glued and nailed to the front.
Then I attached the side molding. It is glued in the first 8 inches from the front and nailed. I filled the nail holes with my home make wood filler. Cherry sanding dust and hide glue. I sanded everything to 180 grit before attaching and then did a little light sanding over the nail holes after filling.
The molding is finished. Now the next step will be making the curved bracket feet. Should be challenging.
Here is today's video:
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