Glass spacing

[Trecelyn]

Hi

I'm being asked more often to frame without a mat and I was wondering what members here used to keep the glass away from the work?
For smaller pieces I have used 3mmx6mm strips of wood from modelling shops but as they ususlly come in 450mm lengths they're not great for larger pieces. I have used EconoSpace from Lion but are there alternatives?

Thanks in advance

T.

[prospero]

Rose&Hollis do 4.5mm x 6mm PSE (F1) in four different timbers.

I have in the past used strips of mount board covered one side with d/s tape. (stuck to the glass).

Depends on how much spacing you need.

[Not your average framer]

I tend to slice up bits of left over moulding scraps. Obeche is my favorite wood type for spacers, there's much less of an issue with raised grain with Obeche, than with Pine when you paint, or finish the spacers. It's not unknown for me to sometimes add a bit more width to the spacer,so that part of the width is visable throgh the glass, when I do this I like a bit of the flat edge of the spacer and also a chamfer to be on show. I like my chamfers to be a little bigger than the size of the chamfers that you see on the more common basic gold slips.

I'm much more in to the sort of shape of the fairly elegant looking spacers of the Art Deco era of the 1930's. I go out of my way to make certain things look distinctive and different. Customer's obviously get offered the choice, when they see my display chevrons in place against sample chevron samples of the moulding which they have choosen. Thy nearly always choose one of my nice chunky spacers. A more visible and distinctive spacer turm the ordinary in to something special.

Most of my hand finished spacers are usually charge at the same price, so there is no price penalty for choosing the one that looks the best. Little things that make an ordinary frame look special are my way of trying to get customers to come back next time they need some framing doing. I know there's no guarantee with things like this, but producing something which looks better that what other local framers can offer, must to some extent get me noticed.

These days I almost never bother to buy any normal factory finished slips, or spacers at all. It's much to quick, easy and convenient to make them out of scraps. To be honest, I enjoy making and hand finishing slips, spacers and stuff like this is like a therapy to me.

[Gesso&Bole]

Centrado do some paper covered obeche spacers that are pretty good, but mostly I use fomecor, 5mm in black or white, or 3mm with mountboard stuck to it first, and then trimmed on the wall mounted cutter to the exact depth I want

[Justintime]

I use Rose and Hollis paper wrapped spacers most of the time, they come in packs of 12 meters in white, ivory and black from 6.5mmx5mm up to 25.5mmx5mm. If you cut them 1mm smaller than the frame size they can be underpin joined with 5mm wedges and just slot in. If the frame is large then a few alternate dabs of double sided tape and EVA glue will stop bowing in the middle. I never rely on double sided tape alone. I have already had a couple of pieces back in from when I only used tape.
Sometimes a much more stylish look is to use matching mountboard spacers. Generally I use 5mm foamboard and 1400 mountboard. Tape and glue a length of foamboard onto mountboard, then square up and cut to the desired depth on the mountcutter straight edge, using the same principle for attaching these to the rebate. I do top and bottom first and cut the sides to fit. This is belt and braces, so if the top comes loose it will be held in place by the sides.

[David McCormack]

Sometimes a much more stylish look is to use matching mountboard spacers.

I like this method too
Also, a good discussion here on the subject: viewtopic.php?f=32&t=16471&p=126854

[Not your average framer]

I have sometimes seen the four pieces of spacer cut sligthly smaller than the frame sides and pin wheeled into place so the each pice of spacer hides the space left on the ednd of the next piece. It's not something that I have come across very much. I'm not very sure of origin of this practice and for reason I have wondered if this is common practice in France. I can't say that this method has ever appealed to me all that much.

[Trecelyn]

Thank you all for the replies.

Much to think about and experiment with!

Thanks again.

T.

[Not your average framer]

Where do the various differeny way of fitting glass spacer come from? Is there a so called "accepted way" of doing this. I was trained at a well known south Devon gallery, but I can't honestly ever remember ever being required to fit glass spacers while I was there, nor do I remember anyone else from that gallery using glass spacers either. Various mouldings and a very small stock of hardly any slips where keep in racks, but I don't recall there being any glass spacer. In time my six months training placement came to an end and that was that.

Somewhere along the line I needed to start using glass spacers. I don't know if I read about it, or just made it up as I went along. Perhaps it was by trial and error. I remember using Econospace at one time and eventually I stopped using that, mostly because I thought that it was an outrageous price for what it was. I tried several of various technique mentioned in various books and other publication at various times as well. I have done a bit of taking glass out of peoples frames, who have bought top class hand crafted and hand finished frames from big name London framers and they had there own ways too.

I think that I did a bit of copying some of the technique that I saw in the work of some of these big name London hand finishing framers, but however I got there, I ended up joining my glass spacers together on the underpinner. These glass spacer fames where cut to size to be a snug fit, but not too snug and that's the way I've been doing it all these years. I get the impress that this is not much in common with how others might be doing it. I have not realised this until now. Thinking about it my method may well be not the fastest way, but I like nice tight fitting mitres so I can get nice seamless corners when i am hand finishing my glass spacer frames. Does anyone know what method is usually taught by the industries framing trainers?

[Justintime]

There was no actual training about spacers on the courses I took, only a mention of the necessity for them, econospace and the barewood options. Maybe mountboard spacers were mentioned in the box framing course at Framers Equipment, but no practical training that I can remember.
I was first shown the paper wrapped spacers by a gilt framer/photographer I know. He reverse mitres the spacer and super glues it into the framer. It didn't take long to realise that the chance of off gassing made this technique unusable. A lot of my techniques come from books, this forum, Framers Only etc and lots of trial and error.

[prospero]

If the spacer doesn't have to be 'blind', i.e. hidden under the rebate, I use a narrow moulding.
I did some posters recently, all with black frames with a ½" cushion moulding as a spacer. The posters
were drymounted, so they simply fitted into the spacer. The glass on top. One good thing about this is
it does not matter if the outer frame rebate is a bit shallow. I use multipoints fired into the 'spacer' and
screw them to the outer frame.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Justin,

My method is particular usefor to me, because particularly applicably applicable to hand finishind. I'm not even sure there have been any significant discussion about this on the forum. I've a few unusual techniques over the years, which were definitely my own oddities, the most easy to remember being using an Emafil mouldings (501029104), which is a sloping narrow black moulding. The principle advantage of the being it was a back polymer moulding and therefore did not need painting. I used to use this a glass spacer moulding for framing football shirts. Together with the rear piece of mount board and the backing board, this made up a tray in which the football shirt was placed. The tray then fitted into another Simons moulding (M0093 /Black) which is a really cheap black moulding with the glass sandwiched between both mouldings. The tray was locked in to the front moulding with Fletcher Terry multi-master tabs and screws, which enabed the two mouldings hold the glass in position fairly tightly.

At one me I could frame a football shirt in this sort of frame in about 45 to 50 minutes, start to finish. Each frame only used half a sheet of mount board and just under half a sheet of glass and I nick named it my £99 special, but it was not long before the margins on doing this were getting tighter and I needed to increase my football shirt framing prices. Basically, as I increased my prices, I needed a better presentation to justify the extra mony and it was quite a hefty increase to enable doing football shirt to make adequate financial sense to carry on doing them. My price for framing football shirt went up to £150 at this point and I was thinking about framing a football shirt in a torso mannequin for about £175 t0 £200, but I never did anything about it. The mannequin frame was going to be using a large cover box, made of foam board and faced at the rear with brown faced craft backing board. I never worked out, how long each one was going to take, it was a more complicated job.

I needed to fit a couple of wooden blocks inside the manequin and fit some woodscrews and washers on to the back of the frame. There would be screws in to the back of the neck of the manequin and a gap left between the front and back of the shirt at the back of the mannequin at the back so that I could get some screws in without needing to screw through the shirt. It would have worked by the carriage for delivery on the mannequin was about £15. I had another bout of health problems come along about then and the whole thing got forgotten, as there were more serious issues to worry about by them.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Peter,

I was doing that a lot at one time. I used to buy about three bargain bundles at a time from Frinton moundings at the time and there were alway plenty of small narrow mouldings amoung them in those days. I used to show customers what moulding from the bargain moulding looked like wit a smaller moulding as a slip and customers went for them in spade fulls. I think the fact that I had a lot of room to manover on prices, probably helped quite a lot. I did well out of the bargain bundles at the time.

I made quite a few ready made frames, where I made a bit boring frames look more interesting by adding one of those narrow frames as a slip' Those were good days! I went through the bargain bundles looking for mouldings that I could sell at full price and often gave a small discount to help clinch the deal. This was a period, where I thought that I knew where I was going, unfortunately it did not last after this I was struggling with my health and was in and out of hospital for a couple of years being taken to hospital by ambulance in the middle of the night with chest pain week after week.

They gave me angioplasty in the end and I've been on industrial quantities of tablet every since, there was a lot of talk about me givng up work back then, but some how I just keep going and that still what I am trying to keep doing now. I've had plenty of practice with just carrying on like this. Now, we've got this Covid trouble, for me it's just another time to stick me head down and keep on going.

[Not your average framer]

I'm wondering how many framers see spacers, slips and liners as a chance for adding extra visual interest these days, Framers from earlier era's certainly looked for such opportunities much more them that appears to be the case these days. Why is this? Creativity does not have to be dragging up things from the past. For example, Prosperro was mentioning about using narrow moulding as slips and by doing so there's some added interest being added, but this is working in relatively modern times.

I'm talking about those little added visual accents. This does not need to be a hand finishing thing at all. It's already been decided to add a glass spacer, so the money is already being spent on a glass spacer. Why not add something visually nice as part of adding that glass spacer and transform what you are able to see. It might be something simple, bold and modern in it's visual presentation, on the other hand, something low key, understated and subtile. The eye and the brain, don't miss the low key, understated and subtile at all. Stuff like this can count for a lot.

I tend to think that too many things are being brought down to levels where a little bit of visual excitment is no long considered interesting. Am I wrong in liking to make the mundane in to the special. Don't we like special anymore, and if not then why not? In case nobody has noticed, I am trying provoke a bit of re-difining things which we hardly think about anymore.

[Not your average framer]

Am I the only one who finds Econospace a bit boring and creatively unfullfilling? I probably stopped wasting money of the stuff perhaps ten years ago! Yes that's right, I completely stopped buying the stuff. I bet, I'm not the only one! What's wrong with flat slips to provide the spacing the artwork away from the glass and some nice visual enhancement of the frame and artwork at the same time?