Polcore or Wooden Moulding Advice

[worthywow]

Hi!

I'm new to the forum and just wanted to say a thank you to all the great advice and information I have already found on the forum

We run a small business and use around 2000 frames per year (in just two sizes 25x25cm and 40x30cm). We frame our own artwork and also vintage items such as football programmes. Our current main frame is a 40x30cm double rebate black polcore frame.

I am contemplating investing in equipment to make our own frames - this should reduce costs but just as importantly give us control over supply (we almost ran out at Christmas!) and the ability to fine tune the frame size to our needs. I initially started to research equipment but then soon realised that the first decision should be around which material to use since this will determine the equipment needed (along with the calculation over costs/payback on the investment)

Many thanks for all the previous discussion on polcore vs wooden mouldings but would really appreciate views/thoughts based on our requirements :

Cost : Since we are selling products, margin is important so I would like to keep costs to a minimum whilst maintaining good/reasonable quality - we have had no negative feedback around the current polcore frames we are using - in a way the frames are secondary to the contents

Robustness : We sell mainly at arts and crafts markets and Christmas markets so we are constantly packing and unpacking the frames on a daily basis as well as being handled by the public (including being poked and pushed by children!)

Humidity : Since we are outside most of the time in winter the frames do occasionally get damp either by rain spray blowing in or condensation - we have not had problems with the polcore frames themselves but did have an issue with a few mounts buckling in frames we left out overnight in a chalet (we started packing them away at night once we saw this)

Volume : We would be making around 2000 frames a year so would need a fairly quick and efficient process

So the $64,000 question - should we use polcore or wooden mouldings?

Many thanks in advance for any help and advice!

[Not your average framer]

A significant part of this question will depend up on your material costs and wether you can also make financially worth while use of a significant level of material wastage. Selling reasonably significant levels of smaller frames, just to recover some of your costs and to avoid paying extra waste disposal costs, is not as easy as it sounds! Both polcore frames and wooden frames are vunerable to handling issues and over time, this can easily result in small and sometimes large dings. Generally dings which affect frames produced from Polcore mouldings are not going to be a simple matter to correct and are fairly likely not to be an economic option. Such frames are likely to become write offs and this needs to be considered as part of your business plan. In principle wooden framesmight be a more viable option to remove dings, but I am not sure that this is an economic option either. I am sorry to be negative about this, but repairing damaged frames is probably not going to be conducive to the profitable running of your business.

Next is a very big question and this is, how many frames are going to be damaged with dings as a ratio of what you are producing. This is very hard to predict and it's won't necessarily be a stable and repeatable figure over time. Some types of wooden frames are much more rebust and durable than others, such as Oak mouldings. These can be fairly durable and bash resistant. I regularly use cetain Oak mouldings, as Oak works well for me. I am well drilled in avoiding blemished and knots, using much of my waste for "rustic" looking small oak frames. I have a fairly good local market for my "rustic" Oak frames, but I'm not trying to sell very large quatities of these, large quantities might be another matter. You can probably get good contract rate deals on small to medium size oak moulding from some moulding suppliers. Waste disposal for producing large volumes of just about anything is going to be a major issue which needs addressing, by such large volume producers.

Have you considered producing, some smaller frames to sell, as a way of getting rid of some of you wastage. I do this a bit, but sales of such items vary a lot with the time of year, so not always a perfect solution. Being a smaller level of business, I find it a bit easier to be able to re-purpose much of my waste in to nice quality niche market items, which generate a much better level of financial return. Cheaper items produced from waste have not worked well for me at all, customers don't regard lower value items as particularly desireable and whatever price you try to sell them for is just a waste of time. There is a definite market for selling items which are well suited for giving as gifts, but it's not very obvious what will sell with as part of the market for items as gifts. I wasted a bitof time producing some items which I thought would sell, only to discover that I've been wasting my time. Speaking to a lady near me, who has a gift shop, gift shops tend to get stuck with quite a lot of unsold stock. Lots of this ends up on Ebay and becomes someone elses problem.

I'm getting better at choosing project to sell to use up my waste, but I would not say that the success rate is particularly great. My success rate at choosing worthwhile project is at best 50% and somethime a little bit less. I am usually not sure why somethings sell and others don't. It's just really hard to figure this out, either before, or afterwards when trying a new product. Things which you think will sell, often just don't.

[worthywow]

Hi Mark,

Many thanks for your advice - really appreciate the time you've taken to reply.

I hadn't really thought material wastage yet so many thanks for raising this. That being said when costing things up I try to buy raw materials in the sizes that minimises waste/offcuts. Making smaller frames with the waste is a great idea - we have been trading more many years now and we pretty well know what sells well so we can easily add these into our product mix if needs be.

Thankfully we didn't have any significant damage to the polcore frames we have already despite a hectic Christmas period - it was mainly the odd nick that we could touch up. I think this is mainly down to the fact that we transport the frames in bubble wraps bags - it makes packing and unpacking slightly slower but think pays dividends. We will be using black frames which I guess are slightly easier to touch up.

What are your thoughts on the process pros and cons? Looking at the forum there were a number of posts around it being tricky to get a good joint on polcore frames (due to the material not being ideal for underpinning) and it seems it will need a fair bit of trial and error to perfect the system along with gluing. Would using wooden moulding result in less hassle in production?

Again many thanks!

Richard

[Not your average framer]

I always glue the corner joints for wooden frames, but gluing the corners on 2,000 frames a week, doesn't sound very practical to me!

[worthywow]

Eeek - if I was selling 2000 frames a week I'd hire a team of gluers

Thankfully it's 2000 per year which we would front end to the first half of year so would be around 75 per week .... which got me thinking...I suspect there are many factors and variables but assuming I had the correct kit and made the frames in batches very approximately how long would you expect each frame (40x30) to make (excluding adding the backboard, glass etc.) ?

[Not your average framer]

Even so 75 frames per week is not a job for just one man! Lets say that it take 10 minutes to handle the moulding, cut it to size and join one frames, which is fairly fast, thats produces just 6 frames an hour, without glass, backing boards and mounts a no cleaning the glass and fixing / taping the backing boards. So probably another three minutes to cut the glass and backing board and drop the artwork in place and maybe two minutes to clean the glass, plus one more minute to fix the backing board and tape up the rear of the frame.

Maybe one man can do 4 of these in perhaps one hour if he is really fast, so that 18.75 hours, plus tea breaks. Then add on your material costs and waste disposal costs and it's a lot to thinks about! I'm not says that I'm right, but I like task oriented work benches and like to cut and prepare the materials required on each bench. It sort of works for me, but that's how I've been doing things for very long time and it would take a lot of moving things about before I can try other ways of doing things.

I like smaller batches myself, as it gives me time in between batches to do other things. I also like to order material for batch jobs and when they get delvered, I immediately start to process the material in to whatever I am needing to be producing without bothering about putting my deliveries away. At times like this I mostly live on cups of coffee, for several hours at a time. When I am getting fed up, I just go home and come back another time, or even another day.

[Gesso&Bole]

Hi Richard

It sounds as though you may be answering your own question regarding Polcore. If your customers like them, and you've not had issues with damage, then Polcore would seem to be the way to go, as you get more frame for your money.

Mark is obsessed with making small frames out of wastage. If you are making only a couple of sizes of frames, in reasonably large quantities, then I can't see that you are going to get much wastage. Polcore comes in standard sized lengths, so you just need to work out the best number of long sides and short sides to cut out of each length so you are left with almost no waste. As to glass and backs, use cutlistoptimizer.com this is a free website that will enable you to enter your sheet size, and your image sizes and work out the most efficient cutting combination. You can then buy your sheet materials in the most efficient size.

In terms of what sort of equipment you will need, is all down to how much you want to invest in order to get the speed of production that you need. It may be that your current supplier has full factory type production facilities like a double mitre saw, fast pneumatic underpinner, and wall mounted panel cutters. There is a huge gulf in terms of how much time would be required to make that sort of product with top end equipment, and large volume bulk buying, vs bespoke equipment and low volume purchasing - there may not be the savings you are hoping for.

My advice would be that unless you are planning to increase sales massively, you should be able to get a better price from a 'factory type' supplier rather than making them yourself for your sort of volume.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Jeremy,

Yes, I Know that it sounds crazy, but I sell stupid amouts of small Oak frames. It's easily five, or six times easier to sell my small Oak frames than most other small frames in most other wood types. They make great gifts for customers to give away. I have some nice flat pack, fold togther postage boxes are strips of packaging from my regular packaging suppliers and pack these ready to post for my customers. I can even tell them what the postage charge is going to be.

It's just a different sales angle and so far it's been relatively sucessful as well. Postage weight and charges are a real big thing to get right in advance. Making the job easier for your customers and having all the right answers to their negative thoughts is a real big deal. It has not work nearly as well with the pine frames, but I still managing to sell a worthwhile amount. Small square shaped pine frames in pairs hinged together are also popular, but truthfully i expected to increase my sales of 10 inch by 8 inch frames and they are not selling well at all.

It's probably because IKEA and The Range are selling them so cheap, but it's smaller frames which I can most easily make from my waste, so at least that is helping.

[worthywow]

In terms of what sort of equipment you will need, is all down to how much you want to invest in order to get the speed of production that you need. It may be that your current supplier has full factory type production facilities like a double mitre saw, fast pneumatic underpinner, and wall mounted panel cutters. There is a huge gulf in terms of how much time would be required to make that sort of product with top end equipment, and large volume bulk buying, vs bespoke equipment and low volume purchasing - there may not be the savings you are hoping for.

My advice would be that unless you are planning to increase sales massively, you should be able to get a better price from a 'factory type' supplier rather than making them yourself for your sort of volume.

Thanks to you and Mark - I must admit from the research and your advice I was starting to realise that it's probably not viable (cost and time) for me to make my own. I'm happy with my current supplier who are great so I'll probably remain loyal to them but if anyone knows a good 'factory supplier' would appreciate letting me know so I can check them out.

[Justintime]

Have you tried artimaging.co.uk in Salford?