door-framedoorsmitertrim
I have some door trims that need replacing and I want to match them with the rest of the house. I tried doing a straight mitre but they don't look as good and because it's an old house the door isn't perfectly square anymore.
With these which I tried to cut unsuccessfully, a bit of movement out of square doesn't matter because the profile fits into it. But as I say, I've not managed to cut them. I'm sure there is an easy technique. How do you do it?
Edit: Thanks for posting the photo, answer updated (see below).
Here is some general advice.
Since larger chunks of wood are missing, use wood filler to fill it in (found at any home improvement store). Use a putty knife to match the shape of the trim as closely as possible. After the filler cures, use sand paper to round it out.
You will also need to paint over the filler. Get a chip of the wood trim and take it with you to the home improvement store and get them to color-match the paint (you may also be able to pull a piece of the trim off the wall).
The other option would be to find similar trim at the store and replace the damaged piece. Some fancy trims can be tough to match, but what you have looks pretty basic.
For what it's worth, in the last place we rented, our rabbit used to gnaw on the door trim in our bedroom. We eventually trained the rabbit not to do that, but it took a while, and the damage got pretty bad. We repaired the trim using the above methods. We got our full security deposit back.
It might work - however the problem would be where the centre uprights join the horizontal sections.
This piece of ascii art might help:
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Where "||" is the vertical sections and "==" the horizontal.
You'll end up with two sections like this:
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||==== ====||
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||==== ====||
As you can see buy cutting up the centre you are cutting through the middle of the joints which will weaken the joints and they could come apart.
These joints are mortice and tenon and you could try strengthening them by putting a dowel through the tenon before cutting:
Drill all the way through, insert the dowel (with glue), plane and sand smooth. If you're painting the doors you won't see the join. To drill the hole straight you could use a portable drill guide or a plunge router.
Best Answer
Testor101 is correct in both points. Coping this joint with the coping saw is the way it was most likely done when it was built. It does allow for a corner to be a bit of out of square, but doing this will be taxing on the blade of a coping saw, it is a lot of wood to cut through. But it can be done with patience. Trying to rush through a cut this size will break blades.
If you have access to a band saw, it would make it much easier to do, but to get it a tight fit would still require some tweaking. Whether you run the stock at a slight angle after the cut is started to give the cut an extra relief in the back, what I have been taught is "back cut", so the face of the cut is absolutely tight but the mating faces are gapped slightly, but that does not matter since it is not visible. You could use a rasp to tune the cut too. This back cut can be done with the coping saw too.