The Framers Forum

A guy brought me a framed mirror this morning. He wants the frame strengthening.

It's a 48" x 36" 1/4" thick mirror with a 1" ornate gold frame. The corners are nailed. This thing must weigh 20Kg.
It was made in Kenya about 50 years ago. And for all that time since it has been hanging from 4 strands of thin wire
attached to single small (No.14?) screw-rings. The glue on the frame corners has long-since given up but despite this the corners
are not gapping noticeably.

All-in-all I think this is quite miraculous.

Sounds like a lot of bad luck if that mirror fell!

You've reminded me, the one in our living room is hanging by a pretty stretched bit of wire

What are you going to do with the frame, Mr.P...keep as a mirror or put a painting in it?

BTW, do you get as excited as that Salavge Hunter (Drew Pritchard) bloke over 'foxing' on old mirrors? He seems to love tem most when you can barely see your reflection in them!

I'm going to make a subframe out of some flat timber and screw though this into the back of the mirror frame. Then concoct
a cleat system whereby a batten fixed into the wall will lock into the subframe.

The mirror is quite a nice item as it's rolled glass rather than modern float, so it is slightly wavy. Antique mirrors are quite the
thing. I've tried 'antiquing' modern ones, but the protective backing is virtually bullet proof and nothing I've tied will strip it.

Old mirrors with loose corner joints can be quite a helpful way of earning a few bob fixing them. I get asked fix stuff like this for time to time and since I have an old Stanley framers vice and a compressed air driven 18 gauge nail gun this is a very quick, neat and solid repair in not much time.

I cross nail the corner joints and as a result, the scope for corners opening again is pretty much eliminated. Also as the material cost to carry out such repairs is so little, jobs like this are usually good for profitability.