The Framers Forum

just wondering which board maker will be the first to start selling a 34 inch wide board for us cmc users who lose an inch and a half due to the clamps.

In this waste conscious age, consider cutting the mount to size before cutting the aperture in the CMC. That way the material along the clamped edges need not be scrapped.

Only works for mount widths of 1.5in or greater, of course.

John wrote:In this waste conscious age, consider cutting the mount to size before cutting the aperture in the CMC. That way the material along the clamped edges need not be scrapped.

Only works for mount widths of 1.5in or greater, of course.

Good advice John. More than half my mats I cut to size first for economy!

I can't imagine anyone making a mat width less than 1.5 inches anyway! I'm reluctant to cut a two inch mat width.

good point about cutting to size first, but that makes an additional process (time/labour, or another machine tied up).

I posted the OP earlier when still at work, cutting 200 20x16 inch mounts on the wizard, (using rail dodge and bits of tape to get a yield of four per sheet instead of two) Still took up more time though. I figured if i had a slightly bigger sheet that would yield 4 of this common size mount without fiddling and faffing about, i could have cut all the backing boards on the system 4000 while the wizard cut them 4 at a time unattended save for me stuffing another sheet in every now and then.

stuff like that just makes the working day longer and its the difference between using 100 sheets of board or 50 for the same job!

i suppose its a balance between efficiency (units produced per hour) and a 40mm waste strip off each board.

likewise with 16x12 or 300x400 mounts, where you get 6 per sheet using a manual machine or cmc without clamps (vacuum types) you get 5, and thats with three cut portrait and two landscape ways round.

just a bit of a whine really

So - good point here for prospective CMC purchasers - which ones are held by vacuum - also which take jumbo (60 x40") boards as standard - would that solve the problem?

Do any that take jumbo boards as standard also secure them by vacuum?

That would be a pretty big selling point for me.

When cutting a large number of mats that do need to be cut to size first for the sake of economy, the cutting to size can be done while the machine is cutting openings.
Another alternative is to cut all the openings in a full sheet then cut to size on a board and glass cutter.

It doesn't take very long to make those few cuts and sometimes it will be necessary.

There's not a lot of common sense in spending an extra 10 grand or so on a CMC that does certain work that you might only need once or twice a year.

Roboframer wrote:So - good point here for prospective CMC purchasers - which ones are held by vacuum - also which take jumbo (60 x40") boards as standard - would that solve the problem?

Do any that take jumbo boards as standard also secure them by vacuum?

That would be a pretty big selling point for me.

not sure, but wizard take jumbo, but thet depends what you call a jumbo

and one of the trucuts has vacuum, i think.

we have wizard, but use regular size boards, its very rare we need to cut a mount requiring an oversize board, once or twice a month at most. storage of the jumbos is a problem for us. Also it depends what size your chosen brand of jumbo is... wizard cuts approx 44x60 inches max.

the amount of waste on a slightly oversize (40mm wider) board is insignificant compared to the amount of waste from the unuseable dropout. on a per-sq-cm cost basis, representing (off the top of my head) 5 or 6 percent, i'd happily pay extra for a slightly wider board to cut an array of four 20x16 mounts in one operation (one button press) rather than 8 separate cuts and 4 button presses - 12 operations for the same result. headless chicken is the image that springs to mind. ...

...almost as much work involved as cutting them by hand. 12 operations to cut four mounts this way (manual trim to size and cmc cut aperture), against 24 operations to cut them manually, or just one operation to cut on a cmc if the wider board was available.

It depends on your type of business, and tghe way you prefer to work, but to me its a no brainer, with time and labour being the major factor, and the reason we have a CMC in the first place. Waste we can live with. Repetitive Strain injury I can do without

It's horses for courses Kev, as bespoke framers we rarely get a run of identical mounts.

And since we only use conservation mountboard, having a substantial amount of waste on every mount cut would add up.

And cutting to size by hand might actually be quicker than doing it on the Wizard.

Kev,
My guess is that production of wider boards so that we can throw part of them away will never happen!

Unless you are cutting 4x 16x20 mats from a board many, many times a day, every day of your life, you will not get RSI from cutting a few mats to size first. I have cut several mats to size every day for the six years I have had a CMC and have no signs of RSI. For the 16 years before that I cut many mats, outside and inside each day and have not managed to get any signs of RSI from that either.

What about the framers who don't have a CMC at all and must not only make the outside cuts, but the inside cuts too, all by hand. How many framers have RSI?

Maybe we should think about getting someone to invent a machine that goes to our workshop, unlocks and opens the door, goes in, reads the job sheets for the day, then cuts all the mats, glass backing, frames, etc. then puts everything together and phones the customers, takes the money, does the banking, locks up and repeats the same program every day!

Then I suppose we would get RSI from pressing the buttons on our TV remote control while sitting at home in our favourite comfy chair!

Sorry Kev, but I think your proposal and the reasoning is flawed!

its not flawed when you have arthritis. and 15 years of cutting large volumes of mounts by hand did give me back, shoulder and thumb problems, which are pretty much gone since we got a CMC. Plenty of framers have had previous careers that hammered their bodies joints and bones, im one of them.

we throw away 40mm strips of every board in any case, regardless of the size. we wouldn't be throwing any more away.

Colourmount board comes in 48 inch length, up from 44 inch. Sold as "better yield per board". Obviously they wouldn't use the sales pitch "bigger boards so you can throw more away" but you cant trust these salesmen can you

I suppose it depends on your margins and the volumes you shift,. Os, i would presume you are higher profit margin and a manageable volume, because of where you are.
we (as most in the UK are in comparison with australia) are a lower profit and need to shift higher volumes, so i probably have to make more frames and mounts in a day to match the standard of living of an australian framer (?) so (possibly) im working harder for the same buck -unless some factor can increase efficiency (reduce time and labour).

The only factor that can increase the efficiency of mount cutting on our CMC would be a wider board.

lol- we do have a machine that takes the orders, takes the money, prints the job sheets, delivery labels and banks the money, and it does it all while we are tucked up in bed, its called "intel" and its in a black box on the end of an ethernet cable, (somewhere at the other end is our web site) It even answers emails without us even having to see them, processes orders, prints dispatch notes and packing slips and re-orders board when we are getting low. yes we do have to unlock the door though.

we have a mix of jobs, bespoke mounts and one offs, and volume mounts as well. and some of the orders really are reasonable volume. the other day I had a ten hour run at one job solid cutting mounts on the CMC.
Im not the only person in the UK cutting lots of mounts, i know three other framers who now specialise in cmc mount cutting as their main work, one with SIX cmc machines, and they all say the same about the clamp/board width issue.

Most of ours are conservation board too, in fact due to the slightly extra length of conservation boards, we can often make more on selling an array cut from conservation instead of budget board because we use one sheet instead of two, or two sheets instead of three.... but it is the labour, rather than the materials which determine our bottom line.

I only make, on average, ten quid out of a board. So i have to cut a lot of boards. I'd rather the machine did it than I had to do half the job. The machine is perfectly capable and willing, but the boards could be a size more suited to the machine.

maybe they could have designed a machine that would suit the existing standard board sizes, maybe there is one.

whilst CMCs remain the exception rather than the rule, board sizes will remain geared towards manual cutting. but sooner or later I reckon there will be so many CMCs that a canny board manufacturer will start producing a size more suited to the CMC user. I'd put money on 95 percent of the CMCs ever made are still being used somewhere in the world today. I'd seriously predict that at some time the CMC will become the norm, just like the mount cutter did , same way as the underpinner took over from clamp and nails, and the morso took over from the mitre saw.

Os, are you telling me you have not yet got a voice activated telly

John- cutting to size by hand might well be quicker than cutting on a wizard, and as I've posted elsewhere a hand cut mount can be cut as quickly and as perfectly as a CMC cut mount. the disadvantage with most CMCs is the increased waste. I'd guess that I could cut mounts by hand in volume at the same speed as my wizard, although I'd be a bit tired by the end of the day, the only thing is I couldn't drink tea at the same time

Kev,

The manufacturers of mats are not going to cater for a minority of framers who have arthritis. It is the majority that they will cater for and are catering for.

Sounds like you need get yourself a Gunnar 601 which has small clamps in a few spots around the mat and you can utilize the full sheet.

Your margins of profit might need to be bumped a little higher. I know that everyone says that they can't get one penny more from their mats in their particular circumstances, but that is almost always untrue.

Sometimes we just have to realise that we can't continue charging the same prices for eternity. Your customers have to pay increases in everything else they buy. Why is framing the only industry where people won't increase prices because its too competitive or our customers wont pay, etc, etc, etc.

One sales point to consider is to have a minimum width of your mount margin on you base price list.

In my shop I will not cut a mat less that 1"(25mm) even though my CMC will cut within 1/4" of the edges. By default I have adjusted my POS to use a 3" border for the mounts. If you show larger borders, and explain the advantage of the increased "negative space" to improve the appearance of the art........ it does sell.