Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

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Jag62
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Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by Jag62 »

I've just received some moulding stock from one of the usual suppliers. The timber is dry & brittle & any attempt to chop results in corners crumbling away. Is this something we are expected to just accept or do others send it back and/or request refund.

Cheers,

Neil
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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by JonathanB »

Neil - we should all expect the odd problem from time to time, but if something is unusable, take some pictures and e-mail them to your supplier and politely ask for a refund. Make sure you've ruled out a problem with your blades first, though. I'm guessing this is obeche, which does suffer from being over dry on occasions. In my experience suppliers expect that some moulding will perform like this, but experience tells you that until you cut into something you don't always know what it will be like. I've had refunds/replacements on numerous lengths of moulding over the years and never had any trouble.
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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by prospero »

An odd section that is a bit iffy is to be accepted, but if the whole batch is unusable then you're well within
your rights to reject it. :cry:
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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by Not your average framer »

I have noticed that some mouldings seem to be consistently better than others and I am a lot less likely to use certain mouldings, mostly because there is a degree of inconsistancyt about the quality of the wood. I have stopped buying a number of the budget mouldings, with lass depth and skinny rebates and are made from Obeche, because the quality is a problem far to often. I am also much more interested in mouldings which have a bit more depth these days, because they look so much better than so many of the less chunky mouldings, that are so common these days.

Lots of people are not that keen on Pine, but I use plenty of unfinished pine to great effect and when finished nicely, customers love it. I will readily admit to producing quite a lot of stacked moulding frames, which are highly influenced my older and more traditional styles, but the finish does not need to like old and drab. Prospero has said in the past, "that in framing it is often true, that nothing succeeds like excess", it may have been said with a little a little bit of humour, but I have taken this on board and found it to be true.

A certain amount of chunkiness, adds a lot to how much people will like the frame and their perception of value. I not just talking about hand finished frames, but also factory finished frames as well, which I still have some stock of. Over the years I have bought various job lots of discontinued and discounted mouldings and still use some of these for some framing jobs, I have nothing against factory finish mouldings in general, but some look the business and some don't, (obviously some of this will be my personal taste), by at the end of the day stunning presentation is what sells and many of the nicer mouldings seem to be far more consistent in the quality of the wood used to produce them.

I use quite a lot of my left over off cuts to make slips, spacers and fillets from them and there is an incentive to use consistently decent quality mouldings, so that in salvaging and reusing and repurposing the wood from these off cuts, will not be a waste of my time.
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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by Jag62 »

Thanks all. I tried again with a 2nd stick and that was even worse !
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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by Not your average framer »

I have noticed that the quality of Obeche used on many factory finished budget mouldings is getting worse. It's not also the the wood is necessarily unusable if you have a mitre saw, but some of these mouldings are using very low density of Obeche and it is not easy to get a nice clean cut on a morso. For myself, the solution has been to avoid certain mouldings which, seem to be using this less than decent Obeche. I don't experience this problem to the same extent with bare wood Obeche mouldings. There is a particular budget driftwood style moulding, which I did start using at one time, it was made from Obeche, but the quality went down quite a bit after the moulding had been going a little while. My reckoning is that the manufacturer had started using cheaper Obeche to save money. I have not bought any since then. My suspicion is that finishing the wood with a drift wood finish disguises the fact that it's poor quality wood.

I am not really expecting some of the budget quality to properly stand the test of time, so I'm not quite so keen on using many bedget level mouldings these days. They seem to be really disappointing too much of the time, in recent years and the money that you are saving by using such moulding, does not really compensate for all the agro trying to get a decent result from what I regard as basically sub standard mouldings. My reckoning is that all too often, the money you save buying such moulding is lost in trying to correct the defects and the not very satisfactory quality of the mouldings in the first place. The depth of the visible side faces of the mouldings is for me, something that is an important aspect of perceived value, which should not be underestimated.

Added to this too many of the budget mouldings do not look as well finished as they should. I have a tiny little low angle block plane which sits it the palm of my hand and there are times when a roughly finished edge on factory finished moulding get a slight chamfer planed on to it's edge to clean up, what I regard as inferior machining on that edge. Over the years, I have bought a fair number of job lots of discontinued mouldings at clearance prices and many of them probably were not popular, from the start which is highly likely to be why they were discontinued, but with a little bit of hand finishing and possible using as a part of a stacked frame, there seemed to be a worthwhile reason in buying them at the time. However, with hindsight and the effects of my stroke, limiting my current productivity, maybe not so good an idea after all.

There are times when I need a slip, or a spacer, when one of these mouldings will get sliced up and made in to slips, or spacers, which fortunately is very quick to do. Some of these mouldings get turned in to ready made frames and some get a very thin cut off the sides and the front place and feed through the surface planner, as a very quick way of removing the original, but now unwanted finish. Thin layers of paint on the flat edges on the sight edge are also easily removed with a quick once over with my low angle block plane. I'm not planning on buying much, when it comes to cheap budget level mouldings, or discontinued clearance mouldings in the foreseeable future, because I don't think it makes all that much sense anymore.
Mark Lacey

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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by Ed209 »

Was it Domino by any chance?
I’ve had a lot of bad lengths lately also some has been very oily on the back and the backing tape won’t stick
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Re: Terrible quality moulding - send back ?

Post by Not your average framer »

It's quite disappointing when these things happen. As if life is not difficult enough already. I've noticed that a few of my main moulding choices have been discontinued, and one pine bare wood moulding has been changed to finger jointed pine as well. I really don't like finger jointed mouldings at all, but I suppose I'll have to put up with the stuff, even though I don't like it. I'm afraid that we live in difficult times and have to make the most of how things are.

My finger is still healing and I'm not sure that I'll be opening the shop in time for Christmas, but that's how it is! I'm planning on making some nice chunky rustic pine mirrors for both trying in one of the shop windows and also on eBay. The lady who is painting our shop front has agreed to put a few things on eBay for us. I'm thinking that we might do alright with them, I've been given several decent sized sheets of 4mm mirror glass, so making up a few framed mirrors makes a bit of sense as I've already got the mirror glass.
Mark Lacey

“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer
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