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Making your home memorable and beautiful is the dream of any owner. If the house is no longer new, it is not so easy. One of the possibilities is carved platbands. They even turn an ordinary “box” into a masterpiece.
Trim material
Carved platbands are made mainly from coniferous wood. The best option is pine, it is normally cut, inexpensive, and durable due to the high resin content. In principle, you can use any other coniferous board, but it is better not to try with a spruce board: it is too fibrous, it cannot be cut even with the sharpest tool.
You can also make carved architraves from hardwoods – linden (the softest), poplar, maple, oak, cherry, etc. But with each breed you need to be able to work, fill your hand and there is no guarantee that something digestible will turn out, and hardwood is expensive. Therefore, platbands are made on windows more often all the same from pine. You just need to pay attention to the quality characteristics.
If there is wood or a board that has lain for 3 years or more, you can use it: it is already dry for sure, only processing and calibration will be required. If there is no woodworking equipment at home (thickness gauge and circular saw), a cutting board will be needed. Under carved platbands, wood of the first or highest grade is suitable. This means that there should be no knots, chips, resin pockets on the board. Take wood chamber drying, with a moisture content of not more than 8-12%. This is not for sale in the markets; you need to look for it at sawmills and hardware stores.
Why chamber drying? Because it is dried in a special chamber, quickly removing moisture. At the same time, part of the boards cracks, bends – these go to rejection, the rest are sold. If you make platbands from chamber-dried wood, they will definitely not be warped and they will not crack.
Tools
To make carved platbands with your own hands, you will need the following minimum set:
- drill with drill set;
- electric jigsaw with a soft start and a bunch of different saws for wood;
- chisel;
- sandpaper with grains of different sizes;
- petal disk from sandpaper for wood on a drill.
To reduce the time it takes to create carved patterns and polishing, it is better to have a router and grinder.
One by one or in bulk?
Carved platbands usually consist of repeating elements. At least two vertical slats on each window are made the same. And since several windows are usually designed, a lot of identical elements are required. If you are going to make platbands slotted, naturally there is a desire to cut several pieces at the same time, folding the boards in a pile and somehow fixing them.
The desire is understandable, but difficult to implement, and the benefits over time are not as great as it seems. The first difficulty is that home craftsmen usually have jigsaws of not too much power. To cut through several boards, you have to move the file more slowly along the intended pattern. On straight lines, the speed is still tolerable, on curves – low. And, the smaller the bending radius, the slower you have to move the file. If you work with one board, there are no such problems. So in terms of time, the gain, if any, is quite small.
One more moment. Even thick, good, expensive files are rejected with a large thickness of the workpiece. So, when cutting several boards at the same time, the quality of the cut on the bottom (or two) remains a big question.
The procedure for manufacturing a platband with a slotted thread
We transfer the desired drawing using a template to the board (where to get it, how to enlarge it, how to make a template, read below). If necessary, we correct, draw the details well. Next, we describe the procedure step by step.
We remove wood in the slots of the pattern
- To do this, we drill holes of large diameter in those places where the wood will need to be removed. The diameter of the hole should be slightly larger than the width of the jigsaw blade (usually 12-14 mm). The drill should go vertically down, make sure that the hole does not go beyond the line (but small errors are not terrible).
Here is the main stage of cutting the platband from wood - We insert a jigsaw file into the slots, cut out the pattern along the marked lines.
Since the carving will be looked at from afar, some inaccuracies are not fatal, but it is still worth striving for the ideal.
Making a curved edge
Some platbands have a smooth edge. Then we skip this step. If the edge is curly, you will still have to work with a jigsaw.
- After about 5-7 cm, we make perpendicular cuts of the “extra” part of the board to the intended line of the casing. Great precision or even lines are not needed, we try not to cross the drawn line.
The curly edge is easier to make - Starting from the right or left, we make a cut along the intended line. In the process, the sawn off pieces fall off, so the work is not too difficult.
If the cut is difficult, not very attractive places may remain. It’s not scary, we’ll finish them later, where necessary – with chisels, the same jigsaw, emery. When you are satisfied with the result, you can move on.
Finalization
Owners of wooden houses probably know everything about how to process wood. But, just in case, we repeat once again the general rules.
- We grind. Grind by any available method. Faster and best of all – with an eccentric sander, slower – with an emery wheel on a drill and a petal nozzle, very slowly – with your hands and sandpaper. Ideally, we combine two methods – with the help of a grinder we process a horizontal surface, and the recesses – with a petal nozzle and, where it is lacking, with our hands.
Grind and bring to a normal state - We prime. Since the wood must be protected from fungal bugs, exposure to rain and sun, it must be coated with a protective impregnation. Look for any for outdoor use. It is best to soak the workpiece for a few minutes in a bath with a solution. If this is not available, go through all the slots well with a brush.
- We paint.
The choice of paints and varnishes is very wide. Suitable for any outdoor use. But keep in mind that opaque paints will have to be updated periodically – once a year for sure. And that means – to remove the old paint, primer, paint again. The situation is simpler with oils for wood – they do not leave a film on the surface of the wood, but are absorbed into the fibers. It is also necessary to update the coating, but just clean it of dust and cover with a new layer. And the processing frequency is less. Cons of oil for wood – higher price, fewer colors.
And then – the installation of a carved platband. It depends on the type chosen: you can immediately on the wall, or you can – on the backing board, and then on the window.
How to enlarge a template
Simple carved platbands can be made without templates. A few examples will be in the video – it shows how to draw, how to cut. But not everyone can draw more or less complex patterns on their own. It takes skill and talent. The easiest way is to find a diagram, print it in the right size, transfer it to cardboard and cut it out. You will get a template that you can circle.
The second way: draw from a photograph. Not all schemes can be found. Some, especially antique window frames, you will not find anywhere else. If there is at least some drawing ability, they can be copied.
You may have questions about how to increase the size of the found scheme or template. There are three options:
- With the help of any graphic editor. The simplest – Paint – is available on any computer running Windows (the “Image” tab, the “Resize image” line, select “centimeters” and put the desired length (height) in the box. The resulting file can be printed. If the printer is small, it may be necessary to split into several pages.They should then be glued together and, according to the resulting drawing, make a template.
- With a photocopy. Copiers have a zoom function.
- Taking graph paper, transfer the drawing to the desired scale. To do this, we divide the original image into squares with a side of 0,5 or 1 cm (you can print it on a sheet in a cage). Then we transfer the lines to graph paper, increasing them in the desired proportion.
The first two methods are faster. But when scaling, the picture may turn out to be fuzzy and blurry. It can be corrected manually, it can be drawn in some editor, for example, CorelDRAW. See the video for how to do this. Just an example of drawing a diagram for a thread.