The Framers Forum

Men,

Her who must always be obeyed would like to know about Everest Paint. Can anyone shed any light?

Mind you, I might obey her every command but I'd never let the bugger loose with a hoover in the workshop, bloody heck Mikey, whay were you thinking?
P

Everest paints were developed by the guru of hand finishing Pete Bingham and sold by Lion and possibly some other wholesalers (Mitrecraft used to do them before they went t**s up).

The are a high opacity water based paint sold in 100 ml and 200ml pots in a variety of shades. Get the 200ml size as it actually contains 225mls and you can dip a decent size brush in (opening on 100ml is narrow).

If you want to see the versatility of the paints then get yourself along to one of Pete's demos or book in on his two day course.

What you can do is only limited by your imagination and getting to know a few techniques like thickening with talc, not the frangranced kind sold as a cosmetic but fine calcium carbonate (french chalk), heating with a hot air gun causing crackling/blistering. Other techniques include laying on thick and moving about with a palette knife or scratching the surface to reveal a colour underneat applied as a first coat. Application of waxes and the metallic finishes after the base coats...........

The variations are endless. A kit with the basic colours would get you started and will suffice for most jobs e.g. Dark Red can be made from Clay Red + Black

Thanks J2M, I thought my lady knew the Lion catalogue by heart - obviously not as I just took a peep on their website and there it is!!

Teflon-heads R us!

P

I have a full set of 8 x 100ml paints which are unused and unopened if anyone is interested.

Specifically developed for use in decorating mouldings and mounts. Their main advantage are their extremely high durability, ease of use and strong one-coat covering ability. The kit consists of Eight colours, Sand, Stone, Antique Brown, Clay Red, Blue, Green, Black and bright Gold Metallic. They are all water washable and intermixed-able. They are used for painting mouldings and bevels, or dilute with water for sponging or marbling. They come complete with full instructions by Pete Bingham and I've got some photos of his work from a demo.

They cost me over £80.00 and never used so no reasonable offer refused. Just mail me as they need to go to a good home, I don't want to throw them away as I'm no longer framing apart from family and friends.

My goodness, a thread that has been revived ten years after the last post. Well in case nobody knows this, Pete Bingham retired a while ago and the Everest paints disappeared at more, or less the same time. Pete bought the acrylic paints from an industrial paint supplier and had them paints tinted by the supplier to his own choice of colours. He had his own ideas about colours and how different colours would work together.

The metallic paints were a different formulation and consisted of bronzing powders, suspended in a oxidation preventing liquid and the paint was stencilled in to a layer of wax applied to whatever was being painted and then the whole finish was heated with a hot air gun, which evapourated the water based oxidation fuild and sealed the bronzing powder in to the wax.

I suspect that these paints were originally just for his own use and the commercial aspect came along afterwards. He was a bit of a showman and teller of endless jokes and stories. I was granted £1,500 for extra training by the govenment's employment service and spent a whole week with him teaching me everything he could think of. It was the best £1,500 of somebody else's money that I've ever spent and set me on the road to where I am now.

I still remember him with much fondness.

Mark,

I sent a link to this post to The Bingster Saturday.
I'm sure he will enjoy reading it

Keith

I think so too! He taught a lot of us to be successful hand finishing framers, who would not have necessarily have done so and I'm one of them. Good on you Pete!

It was Pete who got me started off on hand-finishing by his travelling show.

It was from there I developed my own 'system'.

It has to be said his paints were great, but using them on a commercial basis worked out a tad uneconomical.

I buy paint in 1litre+ quantities. Everest came in 100-200ml. That's only a brushfull to me. And I'm only a little guy.

I ended up buying other paints for much the same reasons, plus I used give some frames a quick tidy up for antique dealars. There used to be an auction business at the bottom of our town and this used to bring the anitique dealerse to my door on auction days and I started doing much more with DIY store match pot paints, because the antique dealers never wanted to spend any more than they could get away with and I still needed a worthwhile profit.

I still make my own substitutes for the Everest metallic paints, using sodium silicate as a oxidation preventer, but I save a lot of money by making my own. I use acrylic paints mixed with Chalky emulsion paints for normal coloured paints, because I like a smooth, flat, matt, finish and this to my way of thinking has much more of a quality look than something a bit more glossy. I'm no longer using exactly the same techniques that I learnt from Pete, I think that as you go on, you will develop you own style and methods as something that just happens.

My shop stock of mouldings is at least 90% of all of my mouldings stock and hand finishing is a completely normal way that my business operates. I can't even say that it was a deliberate decision to do so. Initially, I did a bit of refinishing existing stock for financial reasons and things just carried on ding the same thing. All these years later, not much has changed. There are reasons why I stock some factory finished mouldings, but these are mostly for quick while you wait framing orders that are needed that day.