I am building a town hall here in N.H. The building is in it’s final stages. I am working on the exterior trim. It is all crown. Doing the facia and fancy returns were easy but now I have to work were the facia turns and goes up the rake. This is one thing I have never had to do. How do I go about doing this. Any help you guys can give will help alot.
P.S. the pitch is a 7/12. Thanks!!!!!!!!
Replies
howe, what is the shape of the crown? In an ideal world you would have two different sizes with the same profile. This is necessary when you change the plane. In some cases you can cheat the transition. You can also make a pie cut to turn the corner in three steps. I can't find my link, but if anyone here could post the link to Joe Fusco's site, I'm sure he's got something on there that can explain it better than I.
Remodeling Contractor just outside the Glass City.
Quittin' Time
Gary Katz did a piece on this in FHB a while back. You might want to try his web page and see if the article is there.
Jim
try http://www.compoundmiter.com cathedral and vaulted cielings. i know that this is for cielings interior but there a basic idea of what you can do . there are several ways/ applications you can do , the crown elongates it self once your headed up the rake. so to find a place for the transistion so to ease the miter. what the profile of the crown? any pictures?? theres some factors that may limit what you do so pictures would help, if you have a creatitive streak it helps... thi will be a good thread there's going to be some good replies.....
or try.....
http://www.josephfusco.org the maestro
"expectations are premeditated resentments"
Edited 5/10/2005 7:14 pm ET by the bear
Edited 5/10/2005 7:16 pm ET by the bear
Howe,
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The trim under the horizontal eave will meet the "turn piece" at the blue line.
The angle of the "Rake" (Green line) cut on the turn piece is 1/2 x (180*-[9:12]).
My intuition tells me that the angle of the "Rake" cut on the Gable trim is 1/2 x (180*+[9:12]), but don't quote me on that. Maybe its 12:9 instead. It will be some combo of those numbers.
I would make a jig that allowed me to set both pieces at the correct standoff angle with the gable trim over the turn piece and use a square on the jig table to mark the cut points.
SamT
You're gonna need 'rake crown' that is milled to carry the profile of the regular crown up along the 7-in-12 pitch. There's no other way to do it that I know of. Better get ready to go to the council meeting and ask the town fathers for a little more budget.
thanks. All of your ideas are good. I will try the 3 piece method. The Architect is really narrow minded about about any variations on his "perfect" drawings. I don't think the GC will go for the costum milled crown. But I will mention it any way. Thanks again you guys are a big help as usual.
Just a clarification, the technique where you cut a pie shaped piece to run up the pitch is only for inside corners.You can, in some instances, tilt the wall crown out (more coverage on soffit/ceiling, less on wall) and rip the bevels on the top and bottom of the crown to match. This will give you a little breathing room. On a 7/12 this is not likely to be enough.You're best solution is a return for the horizontal run, and the pitched run terminated in to the top of the return roof.
Jon Blakemore
You're best solution is a return for the horizontal run, and the pitched run terminated in to the top of the return roof.
Yeah. Build eyebrows with returns at the eaves. Then the rake and eave crowns never touch. Easiest! Of course, archy may not agree!Quality, Craftsmanship, Detail
Ya know this idea of taking level crown running on an eave and then turning it to follow and run up a rake came up a few years ago and while it mathematically and geometrically can be done (Joe Fusco explains the method) I took the position that it just looks stupid and is bad design and architecture. At the time I wrote:
Redstaines- "I just try to construct the image I see in my head. Doesn't always work though......
Like trying to run a 5-step crown molding continuously along a dormer eave and up the rake - an architect can draw it on paper, but try to do it on the jobsite with a compound mitre saw. "--Good experienced architects don't draw details like that on paper because they know its not practical and it's geometrically impossible to do using the same exact crown profile. The good designers and architects also realize that the proportional change in the size of the crowns looks odd and incorrect too. The rake or verge crown looks shrunken and dinky compared to the eave and in the case of a prominent gable end to a sizable house it just plain old looks wrong. However tactfully, politely, and humbly point out the technical problems and bad design issues of running crown that way to an architect or designer you are working with and you can make a friend for life.
Joes method will work and we've done just that but when says--"You can probably buy profiled moldings with different widths. This would in all likelihood bring you close to the required "fit", but you still may have to do some work to get a good looking joint."-- I think well maybe,... but not likely.
I thought that myself the first time I encountered the problem but after trying to make it work with stock-off-the-shelf molding I ruled out ever trying to do it that way again. It wasn't all to bad when I did it that way the first time in that it was hard to see two stories up on an exterior eave and rake with some impressive pine trees nearby ( and I was still young and learning). However I would never try to make that work on an interior where it comes under much closer scrutiny or do it that way again on an exterior for than matter. In the two times since then when we have had to run crown level across an eave and then up a rake we have milled the two crown molding profiles specifically for conditions of the particular application (against my recommendations both times).
I think most any specialty millshop should be able to accommodate the request although they may ask you why? There are still in my mind two problems in using that method or even the design idea of running crown continuously from the eave through to the rake.
The proportional change design issue I first spoke of. The steeper the rake the worse it looks too.
And it's cost prohibitive for the value achieved. Unless there is a good deal of rake molding required the cost of the additional set of custom knives and machine set up for such a short run of molding hardly seems worth it. Especially since if it's a steep rake you're paying a lot of extra money for a bad design. The second set of knives from a shops stand point is pretty worthless too in that unless the same rake angle is repeated again on another project those knives were a one shot deal.
We prefer the typical detail you see on most traditional colonial style homes (NY & New England) where the the crown travels level around on the underside of the "porkchop" on the gable end of a house and then returns back in to the gable end wall. Any crown on the gable would then run from the return on the plumb end of the porkchop (where the porkchop returned back in to the gable wall) to the peak. The same cut is on both ends of the crown two so easier to measure for and compute. Funny thing too is that the porkchop wrap-around design I'm talking about looks more detailed, complicated, and adds more character than the other method or running the crown continuously but it's actually much much easier and doesn't require much math or trig at all. Anyone need a picture to understand what I am talking about? If so let me know and I'll see if I can find one of the detail and then post it.
As for interiors in addition to the the porkchop wrap-around method I just described the good designs I seen have had a altogether different flatter molding treatment planed for the gabled wall.
Also while you can make the rake crown to eave crown joint work by using different sized crowns (and was just how I did it once upon a time) today I am trying to run a business that makes money and the porkchop wrap-around design technique that I prefer is easier to teach, accomplish, and as I mentioned earlier has more "character" and looks better so I think it helps sell the projects at a higher value level too.
The picture I found back then that illustrated what I called the porkchop wrap-around method:
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That's an entryway but the detail illustrated there is really what I was trying to describe minus a 1x6 fascia/rake/verge board which would make up the what we call a porkchop at the base of the roof or dormer.
View ImageHowever in one of my books, American House Styles: A Concise Guide by John Milnes Baker, A.I.A. (who actually lives just about two miles up the road from me) he describes a different detail on page 39 where he examines the Georgian style. I scanned the lower part of the page and you can read the paragraph he wrote and view the two diagrams of the detail. Both he and Asher Benjammin, the pattern book author he quotes have described the detail that I like and thought was correct (the porkchop wrap-around method) as "wrong". I think while it may very well be wrong for an authentic and genuine Georgian style house I'll still stand by it as being "correct" and it is certainly a 1000 times better looking than the technique that uses two different sized crowns just for the sake of making a mitered joint turn.
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...some more comments and photos regarding running crown on rake walls.
Jeff Burks who generally hangs out over in the Finish Carpentry Forum on JLC likes to shoot photographs and has posted a pretty good library of photos there you can gleam a lot of architectural techniques and details from.
This photo illustrates how you run crown up a rake on an interior wall without using different size crowns.
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I'm not a big fan of how that looks but if you absolutely have to run the crown continuously up a rake wall I would much prefer this method to the method that eliminates that little change of direction piece but calls for you to use two different sizes of crown. On an interior wall to run it continuously without the little change of direction piece the rake crown would be so small to make it work that it would look wimpy and silly. Or the level crown would have to be so large it would look clumsy. When the conditions do occur where crown runs into a rake wall I/we prefer to end the crown, letting it die into the rake wall, and then running a flat or decorative fascia up the rake that complements the crown. In other words a different treatment on the rake wall.
As for the exterior. The same condition produces the reverse results when trying to run continuous crown without a change of direction transition piece or element. The crown on the rake wall would be huge compared to the level eave sections. I can't show you a picture of that I'm inferring because it rarely done since it looks so stupid.
As for the correct or better ways to run crown on an exterior up a rake wall here is another one of Jeff Burks photos that shows a mock up up the treatment I've been referring to.
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The only thing I see that I don't like in that photo (and hey I realize it's only a mockup, not the real thing) is the level crown isn't returned back into the wall on the right side. And here is another Jeff Burks photo that shows the same thing again in a real condition with the level crown returned back into the wall.
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Jerrald, great posts on this topic... thanks for taking the time.
You're all certainly welcome. It just turns out I had the time today. I was sitting around waiting for a phone call and I was searching through my own library of photos when I happened to remember Jeff Burks photos.
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what david said thanks for your time.. always very thorough , and takes great care with dispensing info.... thanks again."expectations are premeditated resentments"
One cautionary note for this on the exterior is to avoid creating a nook where crud and moisture can accumulate, leading to rot.
-- J.S.
JOHN_SPRUNG - "One cautionary note for this on the exterior is to avoid creating a nook where crud and moisture can accumulate, leading to rot."
That is very true. You should put a tilted shelf on top of that crown that wraps around and we often finish off those little shelves with copper, lead, EDPM, or even fiberglass.
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http://www.josephfusco.org/Articles/Crown_Moulding/rakecrown.html
You'll have to register at his site to view this, I think.