What are your favorite bare woods for mouldindings and why?

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Not your average framer
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What are your favorite bare woods for mouldindings and why?

Post by Not your average framer »

I use more bare wood mouldings in anything else than Oak, or Pine. To be honest pine can be not always the most consistent wood, but I use it for different uses according to which lengths look the best. Oak is easily my best selling type of wood, you just can not go wrong with oak. Customers have all heard good things about oak and you don't have to try to pursuade them to buy an oak frame, it literally sells it's self. Many oak mouldings are really helpful prices and allow you more than adequate scope for profit margins without creating price resistance. A neat trick is when cutting around knots and blemishes in oak mouldings is to make sure that you allow enough length in these waste pieces to still be able to produce usable frame sizes using your waste bits. Oak does not lose it's sales potential due to most knots and blemishes, as there is a good market for rustic style frames, particularly if the prices are affordable for customers to give them as gifts. I also use less exciting pieces of pine moulding for producing rustic style frames as well and they are also quite popular as well.

The normal colouring for so called antique pine mouldings is not a particularly helpful colour for generating any significant sales potential whatsoever> It looks too modern, plus also a bit cheap and cheerful, which is not what people are really looking for. Customers are still spending money, but they are much more careful about when they spend it. Dropping prices to generate some extra sales, not only does not seem to work, but far too often it is the kiss of death to any sales opertunities. Don't do it! I am curently thinking about adding some extra varieties of bare wood mouldings. Being able to place small cards in my shop windows promoting quality hard wood frames is always something which has appealed to me, but which wood types should they be? I have never found Ash to be my favorite choice, it always seems to me that pieces of wood from the same length of moulding vary so nuch that getting bits of moulding to look like a good match is a waste of time.

I have thought a lot about whether it is worth trying tulipwood, it does not have a paticularly interesting wood grain and often has unwanted flecks and sometimes some not revy nice dark blemishes, but if you cut around the unsightly dark blemishes and use light washes, followed by sanding the the raised grain smooth and a coat of wax, it can still be a relatively straight forward hand finishing job to do. I am also wondering about also trying beech, but I am not sure if ths is likely to be all the popular with the customers, I also suspect that it is a very hard wood which may not be very easy to cut on a Morso, or join on an underpinner. If anyone would like to advise me about this, I would be most grateful as I have no experience of this partcular variety of wood whatsoever. I am not reallysomeone who likes Obeche very much at all, and have not used it as a choice of bare wood mouldings for a very long time indeed as I have found it of very inconsistent quality for the most part.

I wonder what other forum member preferences are and why?
Mark Lacey

“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer
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GeoSpectrum
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Re: What are your favorite bare woods for mouldindings and why?

Post by GeoSpectrum »

As most of my frames are painted it matters not. I like tulip the most I think, but it’s only available in so many profiles. I use hundreds of feet of oak but that is for easels, not frames. I like oak.
Alan Huntley
Ashcraft Framing
Bespoke Easels and Self-assembly tray frames
http://www.ashcraftframing.co.uk
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