Wide crown moldings are in vogue in our area, and coping a bunch of them by hand gets pretty tedious after a while. To speed things up, we now freehand the cuts with a jigsaw (see drawing). With the workpiece securely clamped to the bench, I use a narrow, fine-tooth, bi-metal blade to follow the cut line. With practice and some caution (I wear a heavy leather glove on the hand guiding the saw’s base) good-looking coped joints on wide hardwood moldings are easy.
Lucian L. Tatum III, Griffin, GA
