Central City Millworks recently acquired a pest control company as a new custom millwork customer. They contracted us to perform a warranty repair in a house to replace some old specialty crown molding that was destroyed by termites in spite of their efforts to eradicate them. Prior to contacting us, our new customer had contacted several companies that specialize in custom carved moldings, but none were able to match the 2 1/2″ crown molding that had a beaded rope accent seen on the left in the photo above. Our customer then contacted several custom millwork shops, but all of them refused the job.

Finally, the pest control company contacted our custom millwork company and told us of their plight. We have a great deal of experience in matching custom molding designs, and gladly fabricate small orders for our customers. We were confident that we would be able to help.

As expected, manufacturing a match for the crown molding profile was no problem for our custom molding department. However, the beaded rope accent piece turned out to be another story. Fabricating the accent piece presented us with quite a challenge, and was, of course, the reason why all of the other shops had turned the job down. In spite of our confidence in having the expertise and equipment to tackle the task, we had to determine just how we would put that expertise and equipment to use to solve this unique challenge.

We conferred with our CNC/CAD expert, Rob Thornton. Indeed, he would be able to program our Computer Numerical Control milling machine to cut the beaded rod profile. We then determined that with a 12′ bed, we could cut 8′ lengths of the accent rod stock. We would then cut and sand pieces to fit on the crown and glue them in place. The photo below shows the accent piece rods still attached to the milled rod stock…freshly cut by our CNC (making another pass in the photo above).