Furniture Details: Decorative Mouldings With Bite

Photo courtesy Charles Bender & Company – All rights reserved.

When most people think about adding something to enhance crown mouldings on pieces of furniture, they turn instantly to dentil moulding. It’s easy to make because of the repetitive cuts, and you can jig it up on a table saw in mere minutes (it uses the same jig as a box joint – learn how to make the jig in “Hardware Hideaway”, Glen D. Huey’s article in the June 2014 #211 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine) . But, what you may not know is, there are other under-mouldings that can be made that will dress up your crowns very nicely too.

One extremely easy moulding to make is on the chest pictured at the beginning of this post – called Wall-of-Troy. At first glance it looks quite complicated, but it is made with the same type of jig used to make the dentil moulding. All you need to do is create double-spaced notches then flip the moulding blank over and run the same notches on the other side. It’s just as easy to cut by hand – careful layout is key to either method.

Another more complex moulding that was used is called Greek-key. It looks very similar to dentil and Wall-of-Troy but it takes a turn that just makes it much harder to produce. If you look at it closely, you can see how the it starts out being made like Wall-of-Troy moulding but the sockets take a right-angle turn. While the example shown is carved, I have seen sawn examples that have been applied. Either way there’s lots of hand work involved with a Greek-key moulding.

Dentil

Photo courtesy Charles Bender & Company – all rights reserved

Photo courtesy Charles Bender & Company – all rights reserved

Wall of Troy

Photo courtesy Charles Bender & Company – all rights reserved

Greek Key

Photo courtesy MESDA

Photo courtesy MESDA

—Chuck Bender