The Framers Forum

Spent Saturday fiddling around making up some RMF samples with strut backs - later on when admiring my handiwork, noticed the shoddy looking backs of the mouldings. One in particular is a distressed silver foil that just wraps a scruffy edge a couple of mm round the back. My questions are...when making up frames (without tape to hide the moulding back face) do you choose mouldings to have a neat back? Do you ever paint/tape/whatever the backs? Do you not care?

Would be interested in your thoughts
Thanks

P

Lion do some tape that is like masking tape, but is black.(p78 in the cat.) I have used this on readymades in the past and it looks very neat. Like any stuff of it's ilk, it can dry out and lift after a few years but on the whole it does last very well.

I don't care; maybe I should.

Some foiled mouldings are a mess on the back and any I've hand finished are worse, others are quite tidy. But what they all have in common is flexitabs and a naff-looking but functional stand of some sort.

I suppose not all RMFs go on shelves against walls etc, some may go on the grand piano etc and we've all seen those nice RMFs with the velvet covered backs - you know, the back board, the strut and the back of the frame covered in the same stuff. Sometimes the back slides in so there's no hardware to see; sometimes there's turn buttons.

Couldn't cope with that, not unless RMFs were what I primarily did with custom framing secondary.

People who buy ready made frames rarely have any interest in what the back looks like, usually the main thing they want is CHEAP!

If you are framing a customers work in a ready made frame to save the customer either time, or money, then that's another matter and in that case I would tape the back and charge for doing so.