Spent 3 hours fighting a miter saw cut that should've taken 10 minutes

Ngl, last Tuesday I was trying to cut crown molding for a kitchen in Austin and the angle kept coming out wrong. I kept adjusting the bevel and the miter thinking my saw was out of calibration. After 3 hours of frustration and wasting like 8 feet of molding, I realized the ceiling in that corner was out of level by almost a quarter inch. The cut was perfect, but the wall was the problem the whole time. I ended up just scribing the molding to fit and it worked fine in 20 minutes. Has anyone else wasted a whole afternoon on a simple cut before figuring out it wasn't even the tool's fault?

3 comments

3 Comments

lauras8314d ago

That thing about the ceiling being out of level is a classic homeowner special. You check the saw three times with a square and it's dead on, but the crown molding trick is that it references the wall and ceiling at the same time. So if either surface is tilted or bowed, the spring angle changes and your perfect 45 degree cut turns into garbage. I've learned to always check the corner angle with a bevel gauge before I even turn the saw on, especially in older houses where nothing is square. Scribing it like you did is definitely the pro move when the walls won't cooperate.

christopher_wells414d ago

Hang on, half an inch over a 10-foot run? That's not even a slope, that's a carnival funhouse floor. I don't know how you didn't just pack up and walk away after the first hour.

john_cooper14d ago

I read something somewhere that drywallers and framers basically never work to the same standards we do, they just sort of eyeball it and call it good enough. That quarter inch of ceiling slope was probably a drywall joint that got mudded thick on one side. The part that gets me is how you can check your saw with a digital angle finder, double check with a speed square, and it still doesn't matter if the wall is the one that's wrong. I had a similar thing happen with baseboard once where the floor was off by half an inch over a 10 foot run, and I spent an hour shimming and recutting before I just gave up and scribed the whole thing. Scribing is one of those skills nobody teaches you in a YouTube video but it saves your whole day when the house is built like a funhouse.