A frame within a frame?

[Not your average framer]

This particular thread is creating quite a bit of interest and I'm thinking that this might be a very helpful thread to many of us, particularly when it comes to turning dead stock into money. What I an often looking for is mouldings which will stack together, with other mouldings which you have no use for, but can be made into an attractive and interesting frame and after a while when everyone else can see the potential, maybe we will all be thinking the same. Factory finished moulding which are older left over stock of little importance, may often become something really special as part of a stacked moulding frame. What are your favorite low cost factory finished moulding for making stacked moulding frames? Personally, I've still got a fairly substantial collection of bits and pieces from the days when Frinton Mouldings still did their bargain bundles and these were very useful. The were a mixed bunch. You never knew what you were going to get. They started out as 75 metres of moulding for £25, but after a while they became 50 metres of moulding for £25. Originally although it was a mixed bunch, it was mostly Frinton and Wessex left overs, but in later years the quality was less exciting, but give them their due, it was still reasonable value for money. I often used these for last minute Christmas framing orders and I did quite well with these at the time!

I usually bought three bargain bundles at a time, because this came upto the carriage paid order value and saved me a bit more money. Sadly that's all gone now and we are now needing to find another way of producing nice frames without too much material cost. Today it's perhaps not so easy, but old habits die hard and I'm still looking for how to make those sweet deals. For me, stacked moulding frames is still where it is at, in that regard. A common formula for me is something not very expensive in the middle and something more interesting at the right price stacked on each side to make look like a good deal for the money. I have a couple of general pricing rules, which are guidelines to me. The first one is that the minimum overall price for an items needs to be at least £1 for every minute spent making it and if the price comes out too high, then you need to work more efficiently. The second rule is that the overall cost of the materials needs to br less than one tenth of the overall customer price. I generally reckon that for a small one man business like mine about 25 to 35 percent of the time in the shop is likely to be about the normal amount of genuinely productive work time and the remander of the time is doing things which are necessary, but don't generate any actual income.

Sales income in my location is a very seasonal thing and certain months of the year are a bit slow. It is during these slower months that I still need to be producing saleable product to assist during the better months, when sales are better. It is very helpful to have a varied stock of interesting items on display for sale and variety tends to be what it is all about. Although I like to produce items in batches, I don't want to have them all on display at the same time as that does not work best for sales, not apparently have lots of something, will often focus the mind of a customer to buy it, before someone else buys it. I am the son of an old fashioned shop owner and I grew up learning business as my father taught me, so I'm fairly much an old school framer and quite old school in terms of how I like to run my business as well. Stacked moulding frames are probably something like about 50 percent of all the frames which I produce and handfinished frames are at least 90 percent of all the frames which I produce. I'm still here after about twenty years and a heart attack, a smaller stroke and a more serious stroke, so I guess that is not too bad. I have been through some pretty bad times and still kept going, so maybe that's how it will be able to continue a little white yet.

Stacked moulding frames may just be a good idea for difficult times ahead!

[Not your average framer]

I've just been looking at the Prague range from Simons and it occured to me that this might be eminently suitable as part of a stacked moulding frame combination by using one of the larger profiles from that range on the outside of a stacked moulding frame and one of the smaller profiles on the inside, with a flat black moulding in between the two. Anyone else think so as well?

https://djsimons.co.uk/?s=PRAG&post_type=product

I am always careful to keep to inexpensive moulding to produce stacked moulding frames, because the cost can easily add up quite a lot, but maybe this might be sufficiently stunning for customers to pay the extra!

[Estelle]

Hi Mark
This is the main problem I’m having, - finding an outer moulding with a rebate deep enough to accommodate an inner moulding.
The only way round it that I can think of, is to screw some wood along the base of the outer moulding to bring it in line or beyond the depth of the inner mouldings where they protrude. Is that ever done? Would it be acceptable?
Many thanks again for all your input, as you say, my issue seems to aroused some interest.
Jane.

[Justintime]

In case you're unfamiliar with it, the Fletcher Multimaster point gun can be used to join stacked frames. Lions also do some fixings that look like very thin brass mirror plates which fix from the inside of the outer frame and fold over, very useful.
If the outer frame is wide enough it doesn't necessarily have to be an issue if the inside frame is deeper. Once it's all paper taped on the back it looks fine. It's fine if the frame appears to sit off the wall, when it's actually resting on the wall by the back of the inner frame. As long as the customer is made aware of what to expect and they are happy then I think it's fine. Our work is often a complete mystery to the customer, but I find sharing some techniques and methods with them helps build trust.
I have extended barewood frames by gluing and fixing more moulding to the back. I would only do it again if it was entirely necessary, there's a fair bit of labour involved to get it seamless.

[Not your average framer]

Hi jane,

In this case, it's not such a big issue. The ovall depth of the inner frame is only 3mm deeper than the rebate deep of the depth of the outer frame. If you chose a a not very deep middle moulding with a narrow and not very thick rebate edge. The inner moulding won't be sticking out of the rear of the frame very much and will be set back enough from the outer edge enough not to be visible. Alternatively, you could use a middle moulding which brings the inner moulding forward in the frame like this one:-

https://djsimons.co.uk/product/reverse-wood/

It's not particularly bad on price and would save money as you would finish it yourself. I personally would trim back the rebate sight edges lip, so as not to lose to much exposure on the front face of the inner moulding. This profile of moulding is called an Ogee moulding. Rose and Hollis have got a few Ogee moulding in their catalogue, but in this case the Simons moulding is best suited for this particular need as it positions the inner moulding a little further forward and therefore the inner moulding does not project out of the rear of the overall stacked moulding frame.

Do you have a table saw, or a band saw? I'm one of those who adapts cheaper moulding to avoid buying more expensive mouldings to suit particular tasks and I stock a very nicely priced reverse profile moulding, which I would simply use the other way around a cut a new rebate on the other side of the moulding and basically halve the cost of the middle moulding. You can't so easily do this, with a band saw, but there are still ways, if you cut a bit of the edge, then cut the off cut down a bit and glue part of i back into position.

With practice, it's not as fiddly as it sounds, but definiely less fuss to add the new rebate on a table saw. Many of us on the forum who regularly produce handfinished frames, or stacked moulding frames have table saws, as this makes many things possible which are otherwise not possible. Maybe as you get into stacked moulding frames, you will be thinking about getting a table saw too. It's not a decision to rush into, as not all of are thinking that we will be needing to use one! I've gone all the way and have a fairly extensive collection of woodworking machine tools, which not everyone does!

I was already buying many of these workworking power tools, before my stroke, but since my stroke many of these tools have enabled me to still manage tasks which I was no longer able to do after the stroke. Not all mouldings fit together nicely to produce stacked moulding frames very easily and this is where adapting existing old stock can often be made to fit after simple adaptions with a table saw, or a router mounted in a router tabble. Whenever possible I like to use something which I already have and been able to adapt moulding to fit each other is quite helpfu at times.

[vintage frames]

If I can just jump in there - what you say is exactly right. Fill the base of the outside moulding with some extra timber.
Use the obeche fillets F1 to F8 from R&H to do this.
However, the downside is that the frame can look a bit heavy when viewed from the side, so there are two ways of improving that.

The first and easiest is to carve a rough bevel on the bottom edge with a Stanley knife and then sand it smooth with medium grade sandpaper. Don't worry about the finish - once it's painted no one will ever notice.

The second way is to be really clever and use a moulding like A140 or like.
Lay the moulding down flat and set the outer moulding down into the open rebate, a bit like a cradle effect.
On the wood now showing beyond the back wall glue down a strip of 5mm carved detail such as carved shot or carved rope.
This will give your overall frame a more important appearance, as was done on many of the wide traditional frames.

[Not your average framer]

What Justin has just said is sound advice! Like many others, have a multi-point gun which is extremely useful and I also use the same bendable brass plates, I also use a 20 guage narrow crown pneumatic stapler, an 18 gauge brad nailer and a 23 gauge headless piner to fix thing together. The secret is to use these in places where thare cannot usually be seen. I quite often staple and glue different stacked moulding frames together from inside the rebates of one moulding and into another, which is quick and cost effective to do. I have not bought expensive pneumatic staplers and brad nailers, but I bought mine from Axmister Tools and Machine Mart. I have not fould it a disadvantage buying budget priced pneumatic tools at all. They all work well and also work very reliably. Using pneumatic tools was not a hard decision for me. I like them, because they enable me to work fast and save lots of time and this make me much more productive. Rutlands tools also sell a good range of different sizes of clamping squares which I use while gluing things together at right angles. I make various boxes for this and that, which after gluing and clamp get fixing together while the glue sets with some headless pins, so that I can remove the clamp squares and clamps after this.

Staples, brad nails and headless pins work like clamps on the inside of the wood to hold things together while the glue sets. As you have probable guessed this is all about speed, which is absolutely essential to my making a living in a small rural Devon town following my stroke. The next step which leads on from stacked moulding frames has been for me, making things like framed mirrors with shelves, pairs of frames which are hinged together, deep box frames, display cabinets with hinged picture frame doors, trinket boxes and stuff like that. Stuff like this get displayed in my shop windows to be seen by passers by and vistors, who I hope to convert into potential customers. I don't sell via the internet, as at present I don't really know enough to be able to set things up properly at this time and selling to the locals, passers by and visitors is better at some times of the year than other times, so I need to try and understand what people will be inspired by, or won't be inspired by and this is almost always like trying to hit a moving target, as people are likely to buy keeps changing over time. My interior design friends are not getting a lot of business right now, so not a lot of sales openings for me there, but there are still some possibilities of selling items from my special offer boxes and these tend to interest those who sell things on eBay.

For every two items which they buy from my special offer boxes they get a third one free, but the free item has to be the cheapest item of the three. I will be doing discounts for larger quantities as well. Lots of these specialoffer items will be frames which got made from off-cuts, left overs and mouldings bought cheaply in bargain bundles from Frinton Mouldings. Many of these items have been sitting in stacks of cardboard boxes for several years after moving to our present premises. Amoungst many of these frames are some larger frames, which are often less easy to sell and I'm thinking of cutting these larger frames down to produce two matching frames which can be sold as a matching pair instead. I've still got a lot of mileage with doing things as stacked moulding frames are really oversized profile for pine stacked moulding frames with rustic colouring, fake nail holes and dusty washes have always sold very well. Several years ago, our local Arqadia rep came in and gave us some really nice sample chevrons of mouldings like this, lots of customer wanted items framed in these mouldings, did not like the price at all. Eventually I made some large sample chevrons of my own wide rustic pine moulding with fake nail hole and a dusty washed finish. They were not the same overall shape, but they were at a more acceptable price, although still quite an upmarket price and they sold like crazy.

As these were produced as stacked moulding frames, I have different versions which had different overall profile widths and different numbers of stacked mouldings in each. This meant that customers could choose the stacked moulding combination and the price, which suited them and it became a really winning formula and kept me quite busy producing these. It's really helpful if you can come up with a rustic stacked moulding frame combination which you can make in different widths according customors personal requirements. I even rip cut some mouldings into different widths and mix things around to create a variety of different sample chevrons. This may be surprising, but I produce quite a large quantity of stacked moulding frames used various bare wood pine mouldings as these are really economical to produce. I am generally left with a good volume of smaller off cuts of the mouldings, which are used for making the rustic pine stacked mouldings and these enable me to make some interesting ready made frames to display in one of tha shop windows at quite beneficial prices for me. I usually stain many of my rustic frames with a mixture of acrylic paint colours and then apply either wax, a mixture of wax and a wash, or a protective coat of Polyvine dead flat (matt) acrylic wax finish varnish and it's job done! In any given month, the special offer frames boxes on average will usually cover most of my shop's overheads.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Dermot,

That sounds great! Those 5mm strips of cavred detail are also not all the much money either, spending a little bit extra to add much more extra sales value to the item. The carved detail strip always looks really classy!