Some Practice With Moulding Profiles - Part 2

In the previous post I showed two profiles I cut into 1 1/2" x 1" x 15" long stock; a cove with fillets and an ovolo with fillets and .

Less than 90° cove on left, 90° ovolo on right

Buoyed with confidence, I tried some more complex profiles.  Having never made mouldings before, I struggled with the layout.  I thought there would be a more geometric way to do it, and maybe there is, but in the end I just kind of winged it with a grid and a circle template.

A 5/8" radius ovolo and 1/2" radius cove, separated by a fillet

You can see some diagonal lines from my failed attempt to find locations to use a compass to draw the ovolo and cove.

Anyway, I used this template to transfer lines to the end of my workpiece.

Found it helpful to write the number of the plane I'll use to make the convex and concave shapes.
The first rabbet is marked at the location of the fillet separating the two shapes.

First rabbet planed away (red X denotes an incorrect layout line for the ovolo - try to ignore it)

Second rabbet marked out - it will provide "runners" for the round plane to ride on

Setting a marking gauge to the vertical line.  I'll mark the ends and top of this rabbet,
then set the gauge with the horizontal line of this rabbet and mark the ends and right side.

Second rabbet cut

In the above picture, you may also notice that I removed 1/8" from the right side.  As this was laid out, the cove ended in a 1/8" flat.  I thought when I was laying this out that there would be a fillet of some kind there.  Rookie mistake.

Chamfering the ovolo area in preparation for the hollow plane

Ovolo cut ...

... and cove cut

Here's one important thing.  When the extent of an ovolo or a cove does not end in a fillet, I penciled in the extent of the profile on the surface or side of the workpiece.  You don't want marking gauge lines in these places as they would need to be removed and might affect the profile.

The completed profile (you can see remnants of my pencil lines denoting the extents of the cove)

The last profile that I practiced with is an ogee shape.  It's similar to the one above, but without the fillet between the ovolo and the cove, and with the addition of a top fillet.

Profile on the right, showing the order of the 4 rabbets
(there's a rabbet no. 1.5 because I forgot to write that one in at first)

Working on the first rabbet - it's 1 1/4" wide, so I got out the Record #778

Cleaning up the vertical wall of the second rabbet

Messed up here - cut the thin right-most rabbet before cutting the rabbet for the cove.
This was a problem because I hadn't gauged the rabbet for the cove yet and I removed a reference surface.

the resulting profile came out not perfect, but pretty good

It takes some practice to get the transition right between the ovolo and cove.  And with my H&R planes not being perfect, it's even more challenging.  But this was a really fun exercise.  Here are the four profiles I made.

Nice line-up

This was just a practice exercise - I don't have any current projects that require mouldings.  But when I do, I think I'll be able to make them by hand.

My challenge is that I don't really know how to design mouldings and don't have a feel for what might look good on a particular project.  Anybody know any good books (or other resources) that talk about this?

Until next time ...