The Framers Forum

As many will know, I use quite a lot of unfinished mouldings and hand finish them to suit requirement, but this does not cater for all of the customers which come my way, so I fill the gap with some factory finished mouldings. However factory finished mouldings are don't as consistent as they were when I first got started. Also there were a greater variety of wood types used to produce factory finished mouldings in those days, but the range of wood types used these days is quite limited.

The result of much of this has brought about the situation where the quality of factory finished mouldings tends to be somewhat a lottery, where the results when you cut and join any particular moulding can be a complete disappointment and waste of time. I don't think I am asking anything unreasonable, when I want to have some degree of consistency from the mouldings I am buying. Why is everything all about price and not about quality anymore.

I can remember being able to buy factory finished mouldings produced from tulip wood and they were great. Are there any still available now? Not as far as I am aware. This seems a bit odd to me, most bare wood tulip mouldings are around 50% more expensive that either pine, of obeche and that should not add all that much to the overall price we have to pay for mouldings. Just about most factory mouldings are produced fro generally rather indifferent and somewhat random quality obeche, finger jointed pine of often inadequate quality bits mixed with other bits which should have been used for firewood, or that horrible so called pine from the far east.

Any particular finishes you are having trouble with, I can't say that we have had any more problems today than we had 25 years ago, if anything we get less snot wood than we used to do.

There is a lot of truth in what you say.

In the mid '90s there was a big upheaval in the timber industry which meant imports of various tropical hardwoods became
scarce or unobtainable due to import restrictions. Not an altogether bad thing environmentally speaking but wood like Ramin
that had been a main base for smaller mouldings had to be substituted with lesser quality alternatives.

I have a huge ex-chicken shed that I store a lot of 'bargain' mouldings that I have accumulated over the years. Now and then I
venture in it and pull out some stuff to actually use. Some of this stuff dates back to the '70s. Without exception it cuts
and joins like a dream. I rarely buy factory-finished moulding nowadays.