Woodworking Tips

I am installing some surface mount conduit and have to go through a deep chair rail, 1 7/8" deep by 1 1/2" tall for the thick part and 4 1/2" tall over all. I have tried 3 different methods and all of them ate very time consuming and sloppy looking. This one is the best yet but there has to be a better way. For this I used a paddle bit to go through the top part of the rail and then a dremel tool with a 2" wheel to cut the bottom section. The other dilemma is that the wall below the chair rail is about an 1/8" thicker so that I can't do a nice tight hole through the top or the conduit won't slide through the hole. The other places I used just the dremel tool but I might as well have used a chain saw because the 2" wheel is not deep enough.  I thought I found a 3" wheel but it was not for my tool. Short of having a carpenter with the proper tools, any other options?

Is there any reason the surface mount conduit needs to be continuous?  Run it up to the chair rail, run the wire through a simple drilled hole in the wood, then run the conduit up on the other side.

Take a Japanese saw and notch the chair rail.  Install the conduit.  Trim the removed rail to fit back in the notch and glue back in place.  Caulk/drywall mud/bondo seams, sand, and paint.

Or notch the lower casing and drill up  at an angle from the bottom through the chair rail or sill, then caulk as above.

Or keep doing what you're doing and caulk as above.

In reply to KyAllroad (Jeremy) :

The main problem with that is running bare Romex through the chair rail won't meet Code.  It could be done with BX, using the surface raceway to make it look cleaner.  Unless it not power wiring, then the options are less restrictive. 

I like Apis' solution. It'll be time consuming but it should look nice when done.

Caulk and paint will make a carpenter what he aint.

What you have done works, I would fill the gaps with a decent paintable caulk and paint it to match. 

Thanks for the suggestions, looks like the short answer is no matter what method it will be time consuming.  Just need to figure out how to be a little neater. 

That is a really good case for snaking inside the wall.

It will be faster, and look better. 

In reply to SVreX :

Yes snaking would look a whole lot better, but we are talking about a 100 year old building with literally every kind of building  method used in the last 100 years. Some walls  we just can't snake down, I spent 2 hours on one wall that I was sure I could get down only to finally give up once I figured out there was some sort of cross piece between the  studs.  Its been interesting,  some walls are 5 minutes and we are done. Not a fan of wiremold but it is the lesser of all evils.  Thanks again for the tips