Darrell wrote: "... I took one particular picture of a
panel with a beaded edge.  The cabinet pictured appears to
have a scratch bead applied around the edge of the panel.
But the maker ran his beads around the panel so that they
crossed at the corners...
"I am guessing that this is one of those country carpenters
who was doing his best to emulate the high style of the times
but didn't know how it was done."


I don't know beads, but from checkering and from binding tooling: if the maker
ran over just a bit on one corner, the best way of removing the mistake would be
to run over deliberately on all corners. Make a fuck-up a feature.

If you made your beads with a plane, not a scratch stock, they would cross at
the corners unless you did the corner with a scratch stock sized to the plane.
You get similar options when running double and decorative lines around the
edges of a book cover, either cross or miter, and the mitering methods include
having separate little tools to do just the corners. But on this cabinet, I
don't see that a beading plane would have been viable (no edge to run it
against, it seems to me).
Tom Conroy