mdf skirting to a curved bay window

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 5:05 pm

ive done a fair bit of work on a house in my town this year. all door frames, doors, window sills, skirtings, kitchen etc etc etc. A friend of mine laid the parquet floor.

its now time to fix the skirtings in the living room where this parquet floor is. the skirts are to be mdf and painted white (skirting from howdens ogee profile )

in the past ive on a few jobs got round outside curves (the correct name escapes me at the moment haha ) by cutting very small sections of mdf and tilting my mitre saw over to say 1 or 2 degrees and alternated it. so the curve is eventually formed over say maybe 8 or 10 or 12 small pieces.

on this bay window itll take forever. has anyone else done a similar curved window and offer any advice other than putting cuts in the back of the skirting or on the front and using loads of filer. which likely wouldnt work anyway given my past experience which was why i started to curve them the way i described above anyway.

would it work if i left a bit to take on a curve propped up over night? its a canny lot of curve to take on like....

stevei · Post by **stevei** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 6:04 pm

You won't do it with MDF. Only decent redwood skirting and bent with a steamer. It's easy enough to make one with pipe and a wallpaper stripper. There should be videos on youtube.

oz0707 · Post by **oz0707** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 6:55 pm

Cuts wouldn't work on outside. Would on inside but look gash! I'd be inclined to try a bend it over a week or so before you start the job. Somewhere damp like outside but undercover. Progressively bend a piece the rough size, drill a couple of holes in each end and rope or ratchet strap and tighten each day.
If you've not got time and it's pencil round You could set up a trammel and cut it in 18 or 22mm sections out of a sheet of mdf, glue all together, sand then pencil round to top.
Of be inclined to try bending a normal board first.

oz0707 · Post by **oz0707** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 6:56 pm

The piece might need to be a full length to get the right ish curve by bending both ends in.

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:51 pm

ok so i hope this works.....

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:08 pm

by cutting i mean like this... not kerf cutting halfway through a bit of mdf skirting.

the cuts are visible in the final finished pic on this curve from 5 or so years back as that decorator was obsesssed with water based paint and that at the time. but ive also moved on 5 or so years in technique and also tools and skills. on that job i marked the start and end of the curve. divided it up into say 10 equal segments and then worked the angles out by trial and error.

to be honest i would never attempt kerf cuts on mdf skirting.

the skirting involved is howdens ogee which is canny unique compared to timber ogee skirting

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 17, 2021 11:10 pm

obviously i know that the skirting in the pics is not ogee.... its burford traditional.... but its an example of a possible method ive considered

London mike 61 · Post by **London mike 61** » Wed Aug 18, 2021 6:09 am

Tell the customer that window seats look a whole lot better than skirtings in bay windows and keep the bay warmer in winter, a lot easier for you

Mike

fin · Post by **fin** » Wed Aug 18, 2021 7:46 am

hahaha the customer is an engineer and likes stuff very precise. the house is actually for the customers father who is a retired engineer.

when i told him there was a difference on the kitchen of 20mm and to make it look right i needed to bring the wall cabinets on one side (which were in an alcove anyway) off the wall 20mm he was going off it

had to tell him that sometimes we work to the nearest inch and he nearly passed out haha

fin · Post by **fin** » Wed Aug 18, 2021 7:50 am

ohh and id missed it out..... that curve above on my pics from my facebook page.... i think id divided the angle by 10 because theres 10 joins...... then halfed that to get 1 and a bit degrees as obviously each join is 2 faces joined together ...... then set my mitre saw to that and cut them all about 20mm wide and glued them together. had to have a couple of tries at it but it worked fine.

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 24, 2021 5:45 pm

so i completed this today. well.... i started a bit experiment with it late yesterday and finished the front wall today. what a fliping chew on. i seperated the bay into 7 equal sections and 2 slightly shorter sections.

i marked out the angles of each section using my protractor https://www.amazon.co.uk/Starrett-7-inc ... 172&sr=8-9

i also used the length of it to mark each section, so approx 310mm each there was a bit of variation.... seemed to make sense to me. Each section read between 3 degrees and 6 degrees on the protractor. so i decided to divide each section into 6 equal pieces. so therefore dividing the degrees stated on the protractor by 12.

i borrowed a mates trend saw blade angle box thingy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trend-DLB-Digi ... 180&sr=8-5

this allowed me to fine tune my mitre saw to the angles since they were like 0.3 degrees or 0.5 degrees which would be impossible to see on any mitre saws scale.

i then borrowed the same friends dewalt flex volt mitre saw. so i could have the left angle on my kapex and the right angle on (so head tilted to the left on one machine and to the right on the other machine) i then set up a stop on the dewalt machine so i could cut one angle on the kapex then the next on the dewalt with the stop set varying between 50mm and 52 mm

i then using mitre bond glued each set of 6 pieces together. so i ended up with 7 sets initially to form the main part of the bay. i gave them all a bit of a sand up with my festool ro90 sander to take off any slight discrepencies on the lower part of the skirting. I then discovered that the floor wasnt perfectly flat in that area so i glued the 7 sets together so i was able to scribe it to the floor which proved to be quite the task... but i was succesful.

got the other parts measured up and marked and glued it all together and used sticks like s*** to attach it to the wall.

i did have to get over some rather rough plastering. and the skirts still will need a bit more sanding but ill give it a blast over tomorrow. i have in the past done this a few times on smaller skirting as ive found whenever i try to bend mdf skirting with kerf cuts in the back it just snaps. and in any rate it would look absolutely gash with loads of filler all over the place. i really thing that this way is about the only way of actually achieving a decent look.

the client who is an engineer said wow.... this is way better than i expected it to be

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 24, 2021 5:55 pm

so theres a few pics to describe it

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 24, 2021 5:58 pm

and i took a short vid on my phone. i should have recorded the whole job if i had a propper camera like
https://youtu.be/Ja_6vu9zY1I

fin · Post by **fin** » Tue Aug 24, 2021 6:00 pm

obviously the decorator needs to come in next. he will caulk the skirt to the walls etc.

am gonna collar that plasterer and get him to put skrim tape on the bottoms of his walls so he can pull it off when the plasters going off so he gets a neat edge rather than all the sh*t he left me with

oz0707 · Post by **oz0707** » Wed Aug 25, 2021 5:34 am