The following is excerpted from Matthew Bickford’s “Mouldings in Practice.” In this book, Bickford shows you how to turn a set of complicated mouldings into a series of predictable rabbets and chamfers that guide your hollow and round planes to make any moulding that has been made in the past or that you can envision for your future projects.
The first half of the book is focused on how to make the tools function, including the tools that help the hollow and round planes – such as the plow and the rabbet. Bickford also covers snipes bills and side rounds so you know their role in making mouldings. Once you understand how rabbets and chamfers guide the rounds and chamfers, he shows you how to execute the mouldings for eight very sweet Connecticut River Valley period projects using photos and step-by-step illustrations and instruction.
Below is one of the appendices, which shows you how to make a simple sticking board – a must have appliance for the hand-tool shop.
A table saw has a fence, a powered jointer has a table, your bench has dogs or a stop. Like any other task in our craft, bracing a piece while working is necessary. The solution is not always obvious. A sticking board is the appliance you will make to hold your work as you create profiles using your planes.
A sticking board in its simplest form is a base, a backer board and a stop. I use 1/2″-thick MDF (medium-density fiberboard) with screws set in a few inches from the end for the stops.
I add screws on both ends of the sticking board for the times when I need to plane in the opposite direction so the board’s grain runs in my favor. I make the sticking board wide enough so that it can be pinched between the dogs on my workbench and puts the work near the front edge of my bench.
Most of the force you exert upon the piece with these planes will not simply be downward against your bench. The piece you are working is often angled, so the planes are held at an angle, too. Simply clamping a piece between two bench dogs is not ideal for several reasons. This is one of those reasons.
A sticking board gives you a backboard to press against and resists this lateral pressure. The sticking board can be clamped in your bench between dogs and/or held down with holdfasts, screws or numerous other solutions. A firmly held sticking board prevents the workpiece from snapping out of the dogs and you from doing a belly flop across your bench and damaging the plane, iron and the moulding being stuck on your bench.
The sticking board will also prevent the clamping pressure of the two dogs from distorting a thin moulding.
Because the piece being worked upon is not usually pinned in the sticking board, gauging your progress does not require you to bend down and look for gauge lines, leftover rabbets or flat spots in less-than-ideal light. Simply pick the piece up, rotate it and examine it.
As a moulding becomes more intricate, so does the sticking board. The rabbet for a picture in a frame is cut first, making it more difficult to work from that point. Attaching a perfectly dimensioned piece to the board can make a non-square piece sit square again.
Attaching an angled plate to the sticking board allows the user to attach a crown moulding to the board.
The options for specialized sticking board design are too many to list. Change the board to fit the piece.
Finally, a sticking board, if rigid enough, can turn a typical 7′-long workbench into something more than 8′ long. I even have a game plan for the time when I need something even longer.
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