Am thinking of having a go at making a large-ish wooden frame for a print that She's just bought... can't believe the cost that she was quoted to have it supplied framed.
I was thinking of buying some lengths of moulding from Wickes, mitring the ends and sticking them together. Is that about it? My main concern is getting the thing square - presumably the pros have special jigs/cramps for this. Can it be done effectively in two stages. ie gluing diagonal corners, letting them set, then doing the other two?
the basic idea is to hold it tight with the strings/clamps and push=20 home the V-shaped nails, could you could use a smaller version of these=20 crinkly fasteners to do a similar job?
When I make large frames I select the moulding,maybe a lenght of fancy dado rail? I then get some 2" x 1/2" glue and pin this to the dados back. I glue them both together before mitering or cutting to lenght. With my trusty Sliding mitre saw I cut the lenghts to size and then the angles at spot on 45 degrees. I then use a biscuit jointer to cut slots in the frame backing corners for the biscuits and if the angles are spot on then the frame will be true and square when gluing and slotting together, with the aid of a set square I align the joints for true corners.
the basic idea is to hold it tight with the strings/clamps and push home the V-shaped nails, could you could use a smaller version of these crinkly fasteners to do a similar job?
My cousin used to do picture framing and the main bit of gear was the corner guillotine, which gave a very clean, accurate cut. Getting the lengths of opposite sides exactly the same is, apparently, the most important bit. Corners were held with corner clamps
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and stapled, rather than glued.
I bought a set of four plastic corners and a bit of string that would hold the whole lot together quite cheaply from an ironmonger, many years ago. It was much like the upper one here
One of the most cursed machines ever invented. My blood was always decorating the blade. The sharpest blade I ever encountered. Never felt it when cuting me. :(((
having made frames in the past and found that they were hard to get square. I reverted to using frames from Wilkinsons and IKEA, which I have found to be much cheaper than you can make them. Sorry, so much for DIY, but if you have either of these two establishments near you I would suggest you take a look.
I found it really easy to do. The tricky bit is getting the sides equal in length so always cut the opposites sides together in pairs. That way if you are a few mm out the frame will still look square.
I just use those car ratchet ties to secure the frame after gluing. It does a great job although you can get dedicated tools for it.
Get a quote for framing it. Framers are cheaper than print shops.
Also look at buying a ready-made frame from Hobbyworld, or else their range of frame mouldings. They're actually a very good range and well priced. They're almost certainly the best place to buy mounting board.
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is a museum conservation web site with good advice on matting and mounting. Searching Wikipedia for "Canons of page construction" (renaissance typography) will give some useful advice on laying out a matt too.
Any mouldings other than real picture frame mouldings look terrible. Get the good stuff -- or else make your own, if you have a router. Don't make the back rebate too shallow either - commercial framers with flat darts can work in less space than you can with pins.
Yes. Ideally mitre them with a chainsaw, then shave them accurately to fit with a framer's guillotine. Good work always uses some sort of knife edge to trim them after sawing oversize, not a crap fancy magic saw from Happy Shopper. I have a guillotine (vast cast-iron thing), you can use a block plane and a shooting block or you can use a very sharp paring chisel and a couple of pencil lines drawn on a scrap of wood beneath. Aim for about 44 1/2° acute -- you can hide a whisker of a gap on the inside far more easily than the same gap on the outside.
For glue, you need something with high initial tack and strong shear resistance. Titebond is good. PVA isn't.
For clamping, just use a well-supported _flat_ plywood layout board (or the best dining table) and a string clamp around the outside. Make yourself a set of corner blocks first - 3" MDF circles with a grooved circumference and a smidgen less than a quarter sawn out. Face everything relevant with plastic sticky tape, to avoid glue-up accidents. Use a simple string loop windlass and a twisted stick to tighten up. Measure both diagonals to check.
Cut the backing board (grey mounting card) to fit loosely inside the rebate, then take it to the glazier as a pattern for cutting. Don't cut the glass beforehand, or Sod's Law will bite you. Write "Return this, I need it" prominently on one side! Don't cut it too tight though, unless both you and the glazier are capable of working to that accuracy. It's safer to actually give them a pattern piece 1mm-2mm undersize and to use a wide rebate.
Glass is either 3mm or 2mm (usually to order) and is cheap. Make sure it's not scratched! A good, careful glazier is getting hard to find (I recommend Roman Glass on Stokes Croft, Bristol)
Not necessarily, but architrave etc doesn't have a rebate, so you have to to glue another section on the back. This can look ok if the added bit forms a step on the outside.
Get
The normal procedure with a Morso is to chop out larger mouldings in 2 or 3 ^ shaped cuts, finishing off with a fine cut on one edge.
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reason they're standard for retail picture framers is that they don't create dust, and are foot operated to leave both hands free. Factory setups tend to use double mitre saws, and you wouldn't want one of those in your shopping trolley (unless you're Andy Hall).
Pva is fine. Commercial framers don't use glue at all but rely on the underpinner for fixing.
For a one-off clamp, pick up an old inner tube, cut to size, and use it as a big rubber band. I used to glue up 6 sided frames that way. Leave overnight and put the fixings in next day
Overall for the finished product, I care less about corner accuracy and more about overall symmetry.
It's true that "Four 90=B0 make a rectangle", but only true in error- free geometry. Out in the real world we have to account for errors too, and it's simple arithmetic / error analysis to show that aggregating three inaccurate corners is likely to end up with very poor overall accuracy. Measuring the diagonals though is easier (most of us have better tape measures than goniometers) and it's a more direct reading of the accuracy factor we most care about. As a result, it gives better results when framing.
but only if the 4 sides are perfectly straight and square to start with. With Wickes timber that may not be the case. The advantage with the rubber band clamping method is that you can distribute the inaccuracies over the 4 joints
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