The Framers Forum

I'm in the market for a second hand underpinner. I know the brand to head for is the Cassese but there is one manufactured by Framers Corner on Ebay at the moment and I think its going to finish around my budget of £200. Has anyone had any experience with this brand of machines.

Ebay link

That machine looks very primitive. Unless you can try out a vee nailer to see if it makes satisfactory joints it will be a gamble. What happens if you buy it and joins like a dog?

There's an old saying that is very appropriate for machinery! - You get what you pay for!!!

There's more to go wrong in an underpinner than in almost anything in your workshop. I had the chance to buy one very similar when I first started, but opted for a new Cassesse CS-79 as the safest option. If you can do likewise, I would save myself the possible trouble and get something you can trust for the long term.

Hi Woodward

£200 budget, its going to be tight, but on the bright side - a reality check - I paid only that for my Mosro 14 years ago, and I've still got it and £200 for my first keencut mountcutter 15 years ago and I had that nine years, and, funnily enough, not much more than £300 for my current Alfamacchine pneumatic about 2 years ago. So affordable and decent equipment isn't beyond your reach! John at Merlin has my old framers corner pneumatic, which has a very similar driver mechanism to the manual one you are looking at, and I think he is pleased with it (he has not thown any rocks through my window for a long time, so I guess its all still working fine!)

The only reason I use the alfamacchine is because of the separate driver and clamp pneumatics, and we work a LOT of ash

Anyway, All this is IMHO, but I've had one of those manual ones too.... So here is my review:

Ive had the pneumatic model and the manual, both lasted 10+ years. all that ever goes wrong are the driver spring and the hammer, they just wear, cheap parts easily replaced, but do check for spares availability with framers corner before bidding. Later models of manual and pneumatic still use the same hammer, hammer guide, and spring assembly (and providing wedges dont suddenly change shape I presume they will do for some time to come)

The machine is very simple, and replacing the spring or hammer takes almost literally seconds.

The machine is one of the more robust foot operated ones. I reckon only the chain driven morso foot operated pinner is tougher.

It OUGHT to take a wide range of standard universal or powertwist wedges in a range of sizes in its spring loaded chute without adjustment too, which means you can swap between strips of 10mm and 7mm (or whatever couple of sizeds you use) in seconds, Very versatile. The clamp holds well, and the adjustment is simple and effective and quick.

It is an ideal no-frills you cant bend it machine, one of the few manual ones that are really up to "pro" use.

Anyway, if it doesn't work when you get there, you can walk away, feedback is only one line in an auction site if you do

They used an IDENTICAL spring/hammer/head/clamp mechanism on the Charnwood "dalek" type pneumatic underpinner, and we used to make 15,000 frames a year on that, year in year out, and it was only the valves in the pedal (pneumatic) that gave out ion the end. The top end is solid as a rock.

if you get it at £200 you wont regret it.

Go on, you know you want it And a day out in Grimsby, too

Check it out, the long and the short of it is that if it works when you get there, it will carry on working. Just give it a test ride before parting with your hard earned cash, and budget a couple of quid in springs every year and a ten quid hammer (wedge driver) every 30 thousand frames....

When you get it, you can improve everything 1000 percent by guffing some silicone lubricant (spray) in there too, and the wedges will just glide in

Kev

Yeah - nice one Kev!

I used a Euro 'butterfly' manual underpinner for donkeys - it saw me through my garage framing years and also through my first-shop-with-no-room-for-a-workshop- - -workshop-still-at-home years too!

Also through a short time in this shop, where I at last had the room for the compressor that makes a pneumatic underpinner possible - and of course, once I'd got one I wondered how I'd ever coped without one, but I did, and only at the expense of my time and convenience, never at the customers' satisfaction.

The butterfly BTW cost me about £700 new - so if yours is in GWO it's a bargain. Make lots of frames with it and in time use the profit to upgrade, and when you do - hang on to it - it is powercut/compressor failure proof!

John,
Isn't it funny how we can have different experiences and opinions of the same machine?
I had one of those for a while and it certainly joined frames, but in my opinion, very poorly and I couldn't wait to inflict it onto someone else. Tight joints were impossible and every frame had to be clamped to pull the top of the joint together! IMHO the worst piece of equipment I ever owned!

Well yes - like I said - once I upgraded to noomatic I wondered how I'd ever coped.

Like I also said - it was at the expense of my time and convenience - that time, then, was worth less than it is now - I had little or no overheads and was nothing like as busy.

Lots of filling/clamping/whatever - but to be fair, not on all, or even most mouldings - then - just like now - my selection of mouldings suited what my machinery and I could cope with.

Good advice to anyone serious about any business is speculate to accumulate - otherwise you cannot be serious. (I saw chalk dust!) For me that is hindsight - I tested the water.

All those years ago some high falutin' business type could have said to me "Buy that Morso/noomatic underpinner/CMC/blah blah blah" and he would have been right - in fact he could've said "Sell your house - take out another mortgage and buy those listed flint barns on the A259 with 2 delapitated cottages - blah blah"

...and he'd've been right again - I kick myself every time I go for a meal there!!

(The Swallows Return - Ferring/Goring?? W Sussex - no doubt Google-able - 'an' I stood up an' shouted IT SHOULD'VE BEEN ME!!!')

Regarding mitre joining - At the end of the day .... when all is said and done ...and ... the bottom line is - in the right hands perfect results can be achieved with a handsaw, hammer and nails - or hand tools in general, and, depending on your volume it does no harm to progress to the best machinery - far better than just arriving on the scene giving it "BOO!" with all the gear and no idea. (God, how I love that term!)

Thanks for the advice guys.
I'll have a quick look around also for others before I bid. I do recognise you get what you pay for and I would like a quality machine.

One of the reasons the budget got reduced is because I had some bad news and found out I wasn't being made redundant from my current job. I was so looking forward to that and made plans. Bugger. Plus we have just found out I'm going to be a dad again. Just don't mention it to the wife!

Roboframer wrote: the bottom line is - in the right hands perfect results can be achieved with a handsaw, hammer and nails - or hand tools in general,

John,
I could not disagree more with this statement. "perfection" is an extremely strong term and a when it is coupled with "handsaw, hammer and nails", I know it is not achievable!
The crispness of a cut made with a sharp chopper blade cannot be replicated with a handsaw. The physics of the cutting actions are so different!
Nails make holes in the edge of the moulding which have to be filled and the filler never matches perfectly.
"Perfection" is a pretty tough objective to acheive even with the most sophisticated equipment. I've never seen it anywhere!

Hi Paul,

Sorry to hear about the change of work plans, but congrats on the good news that you're going to be a Daddy again.

osgood wrote:

Gilded closed corner frames?

Oh - OK "Good' results then

Roboframer wrote:Gilded closed corner frames?

Touché!

Roboframer wrote: Gilded closed corner frames?

John,
We were referring to the "joints" made, weren't we? Most framers don't make all their frames as closed corner frames!
Closed corner frames have a finish applied after the joint is made. It's easy to cover up a crappy joint so that it looks "perfect", but that doesn't convert the crappy joint into a "perfect" one. Underneath, it's still the same joint!

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a US framer once who said that it is possible to make "perfect" joints with ANY model and brand of vee nailer if it is adjusted properly! Absolute nonsense!

Sweeping statements just don't work for me, I'm afraid!

still.... at the end of the day if Paul has a £200 budget and he gets this one within his budget, he would be hard pressed to find a better underpinner at £200.

But of course in my glowing praise of the tool, I missed the obvious- like every underpinner (except the original Charnwood Underpinner, no longer made) some mouldings will pin better than others. But like Robo, most of us end up using the mouldings that suit our equipment, rather than the equipment which suits our mouldings - my alfamacchine, bought just for ash pinning must be the exception that proves this odd rule

and, starting with a foot operated pinner instead of pneumatic, Paul will develop an uncanny "feel" (literally) for working with the various types of timbers.

So, have we won it yet

ps. my wife cant quite grasp how I "win" things on ebay, then have to pay

osgood wrote:
Sweeping statements just don't work for me, I'm afraid!

Swept frames then!

OK OK - I've downgraded to 'good' results - I also said 'In the right hands'
but my main point was that there is nothing wrong with working up to the best. Start off and end up with the best you can afford in each case.

That's what Paul is doing and you can't knock that.

Or buy a nice new car instead and put the CMC (etc) on hold, like I did

Roboframer wrote: my main point was that there is nothing wrong with working up to the best. Start off and end up with the best you can afford in each case.

That's what Paul is doing and you can't knock that.

No, I certainly don't knock that. I always encourage people to buy the best they can afford and even stretch a little if possible.
That's the way most of us started. Sometimes we get something reasonably good to begin with and then work up from there. Sometimes we get something that is not all that good to start with and that can be frustrating and expensive in the long term.

If I had my time over again, I would do it in a different way I would obtain some finance and started at a higher level of equipment first. It would have been cheaper for me in the long run to have left out those first few steps of "cheaper" machines and paid interest on the finance.

I went for the leasing option with one exception: a second-hand mountcutter. The danged thing near broke my heart in the first couple of months. Replaced it with a spanking new one in very short order. Paid for itself in a couple of months in terms of savings on time and materials. Never regretted it. Also, the investment in a sheetcutter has probably paid for itself several times over by now, probably including the interest on the finance!

I started without the aid of external finance and probably would not have been able to adequately service any loan repayments during the very early days.

If you can manage without finance and without being underfunded or under equiped as a result, then life will be a lot less stressful. If as a result of this it means starting with a basic and secondhand unerpinner, I would suggest that you buy any necessary spare parts and re-condition it your self. The object being that you don't have any nasty mishaps, while working to a customers urgent deadlines.

Reputations are built on many things, one of them is things not going wrong at the wrong time! Good luck Woodward, I hope this helps.

Woody isn't ready to go all out and buy everything for a full blown business and he's just starting to learn the trade, I see nothing wrong with his choice - it's good enough for a part-time business and to gain experience with, which I think is the most important consideration. If it has some quirks to overcome, that's experience too!

When his money comes in and he can follow his dream and buy better equipment, he can always get virtually what he paid for it by selling it on ebay again, however the experience will be his forever.

As Steve says I am hoping to kick this off part time for now and as always priorities change. I haven't been doing this for long (<1 year) but I don't consider myself a hobbist, more of an apprentice. This is something I wish to learn to get away from my current career and with anything I am determined to do it right.

Finance atm isn't an option so I will bide my time and wait out for the equipment which feels right. To top it all I missed the end of that auction because my daugther decided to recreate a scene from the Exorcist. I didn't want to go to Grimsby anyway.

I lurk here most days reading your posts and constantly learning. Including new tunes from Robo! For now I'll continue to listen and learn. If any of you need anything IT releated just let me know.