We at DEC Architectural Composites,  fabricate a significant amount of cornices each year.  We fabricate both custom and standard profiles in our fiberglass (FRP), Cornicestone, Echo-Stone, and GFRCnext.  What all these types of cornice material have in common is the ease of installation that you get with a lightweight reinforced composite material.  The question we frequently get from our customers usually involves the cost for making a custom mold for their cornice.  The answer to the question is driven by two significant factors, the amount of material and the size requirements for the cornice.  This will determine the cost justification of making a mold or not.

Over the years of custom fabrication, we have refined the ability to create new cornice profiles quickly and inexpensively, so this has become a tougher call.  As a general rule of thumb, you only need about 15 parts to justify creating a new mold.  This is somewhat dependent upon the size of the profile, but is you have an 8’- 0” part length, you will need a requirement for 120’ lineal feet to cost justify the mold cost.  This is just a guideline and although we have created molds for a single item many times; it’s a good starting point.

If making a custom cornice mold is not going to be feasible, DEC has a huge inventory of existing cornice profiles that you can use for your application.  Many of these can be found on our website, but we have many more in storage.  Typically, we will research all of our proposals for existing molds including the use of multiple profiles to “build-up” a large cornice if necessary.  These can be very cost effective solutions when the project does not require a large amount of material.

On the other hand, if your project requires a significant amount of material, the cost for tooling your exact profile custom for your project may not cost you any more than an existing profile.  The cost for making the mold is spread out over the total amount of footage required and may add up to pennies per foot or on the very high volume runs, nothing at all.

So either existing or custom cornice profiles, use an expert with over 30 years experience in making cornices for all types of architecture in the right material for your application. 

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