Any general recommendations on tools for cutting skirting boards? Skirting can be taller than most things we might want to mitre. For skirting the three options I can think of, along with their problems, are
Buy a mitre box. Unfortunately the mitre boxes I have seen do not seem tall enough, being only about 90mm high so too short even for 120mm skirting.
Buy a manual mitre saw. An OK piece of meccano but specialised and bulky.
Buy an electric mitre saw. Might come in handy for other work and I may well need to buy one of these at some point but they do tend to be big and heavy. Space is the main problem.
The alternative is to make my own mitre box and cut the skirting using it.
Hmm, good intentions certainly, but as most corners are seldom at right angles and often not even vertical, quite a luxury I'd suggest. One place I went the new conservatory had not bothered to do this at the corners, just shoved one board over the other and capped the skirting with a plastic angle piece, mitred at the corners. Of course the line across and down did not now match, but nobody seemed to care. Is this the slipping of standards, bad plastering or what one wonders. And before you ask why I was on my hands and knees on the floor of someone elses house, I was trying to find an audio lead for their stereo. That is my story anyway! Brian
Know what you mean, but a decent sliding compound mitre saw is one of the most used power tools I have. But make sure it is big enough to cope with what you want.
And, of course, it would make light work of constructing that mitre box you want. ;-)
I use the last one because I have one[1] and it is incredibly quick. Old houses in particular can have compound angles from various vertical and horizontal angles together that just don't fit in with a conventional mitre box.
The ability to run a trial joint on a couple of pieces of scrap quickly means that you can get perfect joints every time. Note that the skirting always lies flat when using an SCMS.
eg. cut a pure vertical 45deg for the first part of an internal corner on a test piece and offer up against the corner. Ooops the meeting wall isn't vertical at all so adjust the cut on the scrap and you get a perfect first piece in real material. Then cut a trial mating half on a scrap end and find that the two walls aren't meeting exactly at 90degs. No problem, adjust the mitre on the scrap until you get a perfect mate and then cut on the real material.
Yes, you can meticulously measure, calculate, mark and cut to get the same effect working manually but when you have a lot to do then it can save a lot of time to use the above method. When re-fitting an office with many weird angles and deliberately slant partitions I was gauging initial angles by eye and getting a fit very quickly because I could re-cut and adjust pieces so quickly.
Also, find an interlocking piece between multiple joints is just a mm too long, just run the saw again and it is perfect in seconds. In fact, cut just over deliberately and then second cut for a perfect fit.
Think about it. if you have a normal room with four internal corners how will you get the last piece(s) in with mitres? Especially when making alterations or replacing one part. It's possible to make a better fit too as the profiled pieces force the preceding pieces into the correct position. When removing existing, you will find only external corners are mitred.
A normal room would have a doorway, so you would do the three non doorway walls first, then two sections of skirting, each from corner to door. The door ends would not be mitred. Probably.
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