Stick Your Way to Tighter Buns

Whether you are one to make new years resolutions or not, we can probably all agree that the most common is to lost weight. This same resolution is also probably the most often abandoned. No more! The reason diet and exercise so often fail is because it isn’t fun. Who wants to go to the gym when all you have eaten all day is a rice cake and piece of lettuce? Today I want to introduce you to a revolutionary new weight loss plan specifically designed for the woodworker. It is low impact, entertaining, dirt simple, and results not only in calories burned but a beautiful end product.

Introducing Stick Your Way to Tighter Buns

Here is how it works:

• Pick your moulding profile and lay it out on your board
• Choose a board that is at least 6 feet long
• Using a rabbet plane cut your rabbets
• Using a hollow and/or round plane, shape your profile

That’s it! In the end you have a beautiful hand cut moulding that will amaze and awe your friends. Still not convinced, let’s look at the number in an example.

Last night I cut a very simple cove moulding into a 6 foot long piece of Spanish Cedar. I then counted the number of passes* I made for each of the 3 rabbets and the cove and multiplied this by 6. This represents the total number of feet walked. Now multiply this number by 2 to represent the walk back to the start of the next cut.

1st rabbet: 31 passes
2nd rabbet: 17 passes
3rd rabbet: 7 passes
Cove: 10 passes
Total: 65 passes x 6′ = 390′ x 2 = 780′
*If you forget to count or lost count of the passes made while cutting, measure the thickness of your shaving to determine how many passes are required to sink each rabbet to it’s finished depth.

Congratulations, you just walked .14 of a mile. Now consider that most of us stick an 8 foot board for the average cabinet to allow for some excess. That extra 2 feet bumps this exercise up to 2 tenths of a mile. Now imagine you have to create 4 more profiles for your crown moulding and you can see how the mileage just piles on.

OK maybe this doesn’t rack up to much in terms of distance, but it sure is a heck of a lot more fun than walking in place on a treadmill. If you need more mileage then just make more mouldings. Happy weight loss and get sticking!