# You are subscribed to this thread Making hard maple moldings Snap Crackle Pop ARG!



## Leo G (Oct 16, 2006)

Working on a job and need to make a bunch of moldings for a kitchen. The first moldings to make were a 6" crown out of poplar. Make the boards, setup the W&H molder, run them, twice because of the amount of material that needs to be removed ---> they come out beautiful without any issues.

Now, move to the hard maple moldings. Much smaller in width, 2 7/8". MIll up the blanks and setup the molder. Run the first blank and you can hear the fireworks. I hate hard maple. I run 5 sticks and only get one that didn't have chips or small chunks taken out of it. I'm pissed.

So I move the molding head down 1/32" and run again, not much difference. In the same spaces that originally had issues there were some corrections and some more bad stock removal.

Tried another 1/32" removal and reduced the speed to a crawl. Takes 2 minutes to get an 8' molding through the molder. Still had some issues. Pretty soon this molding is going to be firewood.

So I remember that wetting the surface can work when planing wild grain woods in a planer. So out comes the sponge. I mark all the tear out with a pencil so I can see what is happening. I soak the molding surface pretty good and send it into the molder. Ahhhhh . Just that little bit of water caused the molding to swell in width enough to bind it in the molding sled/fence. I stop the molder and release the pressure on the molding and tighten everything back up again. Now it goes freely. After a few sticks went through it seemed to be working. But I still haven't gone deep enough to eliminate the tear out. So I do another pass, this time I don't put the water on the molding until I am ready to feed it in. So I wet the first two feet and put the molding into the molder and as it is being fed in I am wetting the surface. 

After all the moldings have been fed through for the last possible pass as I don't have enough meat left to keep making it thinner, I look them over and only see a few small areas that are still affected. But small enough to be sanded out without noticing.

I had forgot to make a molding that was long enough to do my longest run, oops. So I grabbed another pc of hard maple and made my blank. I wet the flat surface and sent it through the molder. Perfect, not one tear out. I had to go three more passes to get it down to the thickness of the other moldings. I could have done it in one pass, but didn't trust the wood. I wet it on each pass and it went through flawlessly. I'm not sure if it was the water or just the pc of wood I picked or both.

But I do know next time I need to run hard maple moldings the sponge will be coming out.


----------



## Fred Hargis (Apr 28, 2012)

Interesting. I don't have a molder, but I,d bet that would even help with just planing. BTW, it's not quite cold enough yet, but I also read somewhere that freezing the wood helps.


----------

