do you ever look at your router bits and wish you had more options i'm talking about your profile bits the one you use to decorate the edge of a work piece or to make small moldings the most common are the ogs and several different variations these come in most bit sets and they look nice enough but over time you may just grow tired of using the same few profiles over and over again or you may feel like the profiles that you have don't fit the style of the project you're working on the thing is you don't have to be limited by the profiles in your set you can make almost any profile you want from a simple og variation to a complex crown molding with just a few common bits this is because all molding profiles are little more than a collection of coves beads and flats or fillets all those fancy moldings that you see on the old period furniture were originally cut one cove bead or fill it at a time using hand planes by combining just a few basic shapes in these planes you could make any molding that you could draw well today's woodworkers don't usually use molding planes to make their profiles instead they use the modern day equivalent router bits that cut similar shapes but the principles the same you can combine basic router bits to make almost any molding profile you can imagine in a minute i'll show you how to make this large complex molding with just four common bits but let's start a little bit smaller an og is simply a bead which is cut with a round over bit next to a cove which is cut with a core box bit if you leave a little flat spot in between the cove and the bead you have what's called a classical og if you leave a flat at the top and the bottom you have what's called an og double fillet you may have bits in your set that cut these common profiles in a single pass but if you're willing to break them down into their basic shapes and instead of cutting the profile in a single pass with a dedicated bit you use common core box and round over bits you may make your own interesting variations of these profiles take the classical og for example these bits commonly feature a 5 16 inch cove and a 5 16 inch round separated by a 1 16 fillet what if you reduce the cove to 3 16 of an inch and enlarge the round to a half inch that would dramatically change the profile you could do the opposite as well place a smaller cove over a larger round another option would be to keep both the cove in the round the same size but elongate the cove by feeding the work piece over a table mounted core box bit incrementally raising it through two or three extra passes these small changes can significantly modify your profile and don't forget you can scale these profiles to larger moldings as well all you need are a handful of core box round over and straight bits and you can make loads of your own profiles to illustrate the point i selected three round over bits and two core box bits and within a relatively short period of time i was able to produce 25 different edge profiles i'm certain that i could have come up with many more especially if i hadn't limited myself to just three quarter inch thick material and if i'd used just a few more bits for my collection the possibilities would have been nearly endless my point is with just a handful of bits you can dramatically change the way your edges and moldings look you don't have to be confined to just the few profile bits that you have in your collection and as your collection of bits grows a little bit more so will your ability to cut even the most complex of crown moldings that's where things really start to pay off this large complex crown molding wasn't made with a giant cutter on a powerful shaper it was cut with just four common router bits you may already have them this was possible because we created it in layers which were then glued together to make up the final large molding let me show you how it was done the first layer is an inch thick i'm running it on edge over a 5 8 inch cove bit whenever i use bits like this i like to take several passes raising it a little bit at a time because they remove a lot of material but in this case even after the full cove is formed i'm going to raise the bit even more taking some more passes to elongate the shape this is just one example of how you can use common bits in creative ways now i'm going to trim the cove off the larger workpiece it's always better to run a wide board through your router table and then trim the profile off instead of risking your fingers by running a thin piece of material through your router table the next layer is 9 16 of an inch thick and i'm using a quarter inch beading bit you could do this in two passes with an eighth inch round over bit if that's what you have after creating the bead i flip the work piece and i make another pass with a half inch core box bit you'll notice that i'm leaving a little fillet between this cove and the bead i cut before it these fillets or flats divide a large profile by creating shadow lines and making it more attractive to look at the final layer is three quarters of an inch thick and it's created with a half inch round over bed i've raised the bit just enough to let the shoulder cut into the edge creating another fillet and giving me two visual components with one bit this work piece is going to be left wide because it'll fit on top of our cove now let's glue it up i glued the components together two at a time letting the glue set up before adding the next piece this takes some extra time but it makes it a lot easier to keep everything aligned as you apply your clamps the key is to use the minimal amount of glue we're not trying to make a structural joint we just want it held together without glue squeezing out making a mess that has to be cleaned up sometimes i even like to leave the front edge of all the parts dry and i used wooden calls to distribute the clamping pressure evenly and here's the final result a three-piece built-up crown molding that looks like it was created with a giant cutter on a shaper but as you saw we only needed a regular router table and four common bits really the sky is the limit when it comes to the profiles you can make with the router bits you may already have so hopefully these lessons will help you to look at your bit collection and a whole new light see you next time bitsbits.com is a small company that takes top quality white side router bits and adds their high tech astra coating to reduce friction heat and wear perhaps doubling the life of the bit they have a growing selection of bits for all woodworking applications and they are the place for cnc router bits they are really worth checking out so give them a look at the link below this video
