The Framers Forum

I’ve a small charcoal on paper (17 x 25 cm on heavy paper) to mount so that it sits in the rebate of the frame without a windowmount. I’ll be lining the rebate with tape to protect the art but was wondering how to attach the art to the undermount?

I’ll cut the moulding to allow a couple of mm all round for expansion and contraction of the paper and was thinking do I need to attach the art to the undermount at all, but may be a couple of paper hinges on the back of the art and wrapped over the top of the undermount?

Any thoughts appreciated

Good plan, but one concern is that the liner will grip the edges thus restricting the paper. If you could I would devise a tiny spacer, slightly thicker than the paper, between the liner and the undermount to form a little space. The paper can slip into this but not be crimped. I think that liner has quite a generous width on the rebate so you could just about do it. Make the under mount about 6mm bigger all round than the paper and the spacers need only be 2mm or so wide - stuck around the edge of the undermount.
Hinge it to the undermount with hinged looped over the undermount at the top and secured at the back, or cut slots and use pass-though higes.

Thanks Prospero, spacers are a good idea to allow movement of the paper, cheers

... or cut slots and use pass-though higes.

Sorry to plunder your thread David, but, Prospero, can you please explain what pass-through hinges are?

Are they from the back of the artwork, through a slot in the undermount and folded and fixed onto the rear of the undermount, in a Z shape?

Hi Jack,

Thought I would get in before Prospero does

A pass through hinge or S hinge is pretty much what you described. The hinges are attached to the back of the artwork and passed through slots in the undermount and pasted to the back with a cross tab. This method is used to float mount artwork. The attached pdf explains well, see diagram 3 on the second page.

Here's another method (click) which I quite like because you don't have to worry about making slits, which as it says in the link above, should be rounded off/burnished to avoid abrasion of the hinge; that's quite tricky, and so is cutting those slits to register with the hinges applied to the artwork first.

Also the 'slits' should not really just be slits, they should be tiny apertures, IOW it's best if the hinges do not have to be squeezed/forced through them. With this method of cutting an aperture slightly smaller than the paper and then reducing the size of the fall out ever so slightly, you get that result, and you can also burnish the fall out and the aperture it fell out of, which I don't think is mentioned in the link, but if you did that it would effectively reduce the size of the fallout/increase the size of the aperture a fraction anyway.

Wouldn't be much cop for this particular job though as there's not enough room around the artwork (and nor is there for a 'S' hinge really - would have to be a 'U' hinge)!

Just a useful link for reference.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I was looking for info on float mounting and I like the look of the fallout method described on the Lion site that Robo recommends. I was however wondering whether attaching hinges on all sides of the artwork like this could potentially cause the paper to buckle. Anyone have any advice on this?

Here's some theory on cockling http://frametek.com/HTML/Articles/Buckling.html

.... and here's some solutions to avoid it, including float mounting - the gist is that paper needs to be able to expand and contract and it can only do that where it is not fixed - so to enable it to do so, only have one hinge attached close to the edge of the paper, all the rest 'loose' to allow that movement. http://frametek.com/HTML/Articles/Hinging2.html

Got it, thanks!