The Framers Forum

I suppose you could call this a Gallery frame as it's one of a series made for a gallery and framing customer.
The frame is described as a 3" Sloped Rosewood with an inserted water-gilded slip frame.

Not really a regular high street item but here's how I made it.

I glued together two lengths of R&H pine stretcher (STR2) and then fed these through the bench saw with the blade set at a shallow sloping angle.
The profile was then glued face down onto a sheet of rosewood veneer.
When dry, the entire top surface of the veneer was power-sanded away. This way the full 'figure' and colour of the veneer was exposed.

The frame was then cut and joined to size.

Using a mixture of stains, pigments and transparent shellac polishes, the frame was given a full traditional wood-finish treatment and then polished with a mixture of pure beeswax and carnauba wax paste.

The inserted gold slip frame was made from a length of R&H F10 with twin hollows cut into each side. The profile was then divided and gilded with 23ctgold leaf.
The gilding on the innermost hollow was rubbed back down to expose the bole and left matt so as to contrast with the high burnish on the smaller adjacent hollow.

The gilding was finally treated with a layer of Toning Glaze which was sandwiched between two coats of diluted RSG.
This new Toning Glaze has the effect of diffusing the harsh reflections from the gold and gives the overall finish on the gilding a soft and relaxed appearance.

Boodiful!!

Looks great! classic old school quality stuffI



I love doing stuff like that. It looks stunning in the shop window. I probably sell more items displayed from the shop window while I am closed in the evening and people are strooling around the town and they come back the following day.

Thanks Justin and Mark for the compliments.

I'm always happy to answer any questions, criticisms or even derision.

I've never had any proper training as to how to do veneering properly, but I've seen a few video a read a few snippits in books and then just picked it up as I went along. I've re-stuck bits of lifted veneer on bts and pieces that if picked up in auctionsand car boot sales and re-sold such items again through the local auctions.

I don't know if they are still in business, but there was a company based in Aylesbury called Vale Veneers and they were a useful place to get pieces of veneer from. They were always offering veneer bargains on there website, together with photographs and prices. Now that it no longer possible to go to auction houses on preview, or sales days it all seems a bit pointless.

I not much of an expert, but should I be thinking of getting back in to veneering again now , with a view to doing it on frames, rather that bits and pieces of furniture and old clocks, etc? I have moved premises since then and somehow along the way I have things like my old veneer saw and stuff like that, but it won't cost the earth to get ready to start again. Strange to think that I was still relatively young in those days!

The easiest way to have a go at veneering is to buy from E-bay. There's always someone with a leaf or two for sale.

Then just stick it down with some contact adhesive - best slosh on some shellac or sanding sealer on to the glued side of the veneer first.

After that it's getting to work with the orbital sander to 'clean' it up before finishing.

Whe I was originally setting up my latest band saw, it tested it by trying to cut some veneers from some scrap Obeche. It was to not bad and I was able to cut thin strips of obeche which were about 0.5mm think. Cutting thin strips of pine was not very successful. I tried doing the same with soe scrap oak, not what you would call all that easy.

Thin bits of Obeche veneer are not very flexible and no matter how thin you try to cut them, they seem very easy to break them if they are allowed to flex. I think that cheap band saws have their limitations for cutting veneers. I suspect that thinly cut bits of Obeche might be beeter employed as tiles for creating a sort of tiled finish on the front face of a frame, or maybe as blocks to cover and hide corner mitre joints.

I don't personally think that it has any worthwhile possibilities, so far. The suggestion about buying odd bits of veneer from on ebay is an interesting one. I need to check this out. I suspect that it might be an interesting thing to persue. Thanks for that.

Mark.

Looks fantastic.

Out of interest, what orbital sander do you use?

I ask as having had a Dewalt one for years and also an air powered one, i recently bit the bullet and treated myself to a Festool Rotex sander. It is a rather pricey for a sander, but i now wish i had got one sooner. It is absolutely incredible for both rough and fine sanding and leaves such a smooth finish.

Depends on how much sanding you do as to whether it is worth the £500 price tag, but i believe it is worth every penny.

Nick

I use a Sia orbital palm sander, pneumatic. I got it 'free' when I bought £200 worth of sanding discs.
That was 25 years ago and it's still going strong. Mind you, there's nothing much to wear out inside it.
Having a Hydrovane helps too, as it swallows up all the air you can give it.
I chose it because I wanted to sand rounded and hollow profiles, whereas before that I used sanding linishers on all the flat mouldings.
The little Sia does everything now with a soft pad for the curved profiles and a hard pad for the flats.
I still find Mirca the best brand for abrasives.

The Festool does look a good machine.
Is it light and maneuverable to use? That is essential if you're sanding any quantity of mouldings.

Wasn't there an art deco thing about staining veneers colours like lido blue, or jade green? Perhaps there's some interesting possibilities for producing some nice art deco framed mirrors.

I have the rotex 150 which is comparable with my dewalt, but probably a bit heavier than you are used to, but i used a friends rotex 90 on a job and that is very maneuverable.

There are a good few videos on youtube giving information.

The other great thing is that combined with a festool dust extractor, you will get very little dust which can be great if you don't have a dedicated dirty space (and good for health!). As well as plugging in tightly, the main advantage of sanding with the festool dust extractor or the hose is smooth, not that ribbed rigid plastic that catches on everything and causes the hose to keep coming out.

I can't compare to your set up which clearly works well, but the rotex is a big step up compared to dewalt/makita etc.

That's an absolutely beautiful frame there, Dermot. Love the finish on the veneer.

Matt

Hi Dermot,

Thanks for the suggestion about buying veneer on ebay. The prices are great!

Mark.

Thanks Matt.
You make some really wonderful artist's frames, and are selling them world-wide now.
You should post them up here as an example of what can be done when you put your mind to it. I know from what you've said that you've only been doing this for a short while.

Sanding wood is so much a part of hand-finishing frames. I clamp the mouldings in an old Stanley workbench and whizz into them with the palm sander fed by overhead compressed air.
A dust extraction hose is best attached overhead from a little Henry but these days I rarely bother. The coarser grit sawdust just gets thrown sideways from the sander and is too heavy to fog into the air and the finer finishing grit tends to remove very little material.

Hi Dermot,

What sort of impact adhesive are you thinking about for veneering? I'm starting to think quite seriously about giving this a go. It sounds like something that makes a great deal of sense. My guess is that it would look really super as possible veneered frames to display for sale in the shop windows.

Thanks,
Mark.

I'm just doing a 'mock-maple' frame with the same slip. Not water-gilded though.....

I've done these a few times and IMHO they can look more authentic than the real thing.

Film at 11.

Just ordinary EVOstick Impact glue.
Glue the moulding first, then glue the veneer ( as I said, best seal the glue side first to prevent the glue bleeding through to the face side ).
Leave for 1/2 hour to let the solvents dry off then slowly edge the veneer onto the moulding. Use a piece of release paper as a help to stop the veneer suddenly grabbing where you're not ready.
Rub over the whole thing then with something hard like the base edge of a bottle or a 'veneer hammer' if you have one.

Just ordinary Evostick! For some reason, I was not expecting that. When I was repairing lifted bit of venneer on antique furniture it was with a thin version of PVA and either clamped back down in place, or after the PVA has dried. It was ironed down with a hot iron to melt the PVA and make it stick down. I'm not sure that this was the proper way to do this, but lots of people that I used to know and also bought up nice furniture at the auctions to repair and sell on at a profit and I was doing the same as well. I suppose that I must have picked this up from another person who was already doingthesame, but I can't really remember.

Lots of people were repairing and re-selling nice bits of furniture in those days and it was relatively easy to earn a living, once you had learned what to buy and what avoid buying. Oddly enough, this was where I got in to buying and selling mirrors. I used to convert suitable dressing tables in to writing desks and the mirrors, which were salvaged from the dressing tables were sold as ordinary mirrors, you could often cover the cost of buing the whole dressing table, with what you could get from selling the mirror. Gradually a lot of the antique dealer who used buy items from the auctions disappeared and a lot of the money just dried up and one day everything was no more.