Jayvee wrote:however in the past few months the quality seems to have taken a dip...lots of little black bits just under the surface paper here and there ...
Unfortunately I think that this has a lot to do with the state of the economy and the fact that price competition is such a big factor in today's market.
Like it, or not, many of the bigger players in this market have a lot of buying power and will switch suppliers for relatively small levels of price and they are less bothered about quality issues than we are, so the mountboard suppliers have to do likewise and make their mountboard with the most cost effective materials.
The problem is because a lot of the smaller framers are buying less than they did before the recession, (as are the bigger players too!), but the mountboard manufacturer's still have to pay their overheads from a smaller turnover. This will probably not change any time soon. I also note that there is a pecking order between different suppliers as regards quality and price.
As always, you do tend to get what you pay for, if you want certain colours and bevels which are less bright, sometimes life starts to get difficult. I would like to find an easy way around this problem.
I don't think that there is an easy solution to this, apart from painting both mountboard and bevel. Some of us are willing to do this when push comes to shuve, but do we have the time and will the customer pay enough to make it worthwhile?