Making a mold for sanding purposes

[pirate71]

I am working on a project to repaint all my kitchen cabinets. So far, I got my hands on a Fuji HVLP and have firgured out how to apply oil base primer and paint by practicing on cabinets in my garage/shop. I'm ready to start on my kitchen and am trying to take care of details in that task.

Each of the cabinet doors has a routed profile that is a little tough to sand because of all the different curved surfaces. I would like to make a mold of the curved crown at the top and a mold of the straight indented profile on the sides and bottom. To this mold, I want to attach sandpaper so that I can sand these irregular profiles with some efficiency.

I need some help with trying to figure out how to make the molds....specifically what material to use for the mold. I am assuming that I can use something like double sided tape to attach sand paper to the mold.

Thanks in advance.

Evans

 

[froglips]

Two things I've done to make molds are automotive Bondo and Durhams Water (added some glue) putty.

Wax the surface so they won't adhere. End result is a reasonably hard block that mirrors the profile.

Jim

 

[Tarhead]

Here's a one from Charles Neil:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWHBFEliNyM
I tried doing this when I stripped some kitchen cabinet doors but the profiles on the door were too small. The sandpaper needs to fit into the space. Ended up using a scraper with different blades and a sanding mop from Klingspors on a corded drill which worked ok. Not a fun time by any stretch.

 

[Sealeveler]

The bondo idea and a waxed surface will work,just add some tape to the molding to equal the thickness of the sandpaper then wax and then bondo.Tony

 

[Travis Porter]

I have used the bondo method and it does work. I would also suggest instead of trying to have one master mold profile to have multiple smaller shapes to do the sanding. In most cases crown molding most of the time is a combination of coves and beads so I have a collection of rubber sanding shapes in different sizes that I use to do the sanding.