The Framers Forum

I am so, so annoyed with the rubbish that comes out of the factories and the suppliers as far as the flat satin black mouldings are concerned.
They are covered, well not entirely, with shiny marks, patches and scratches, which I/we have to cut around if possible, leaving so much wastage as to be depressing.
Does anybody have a way of "repairing" the shiny marks?
I'm so pissed off with having to throw away valuable moulding just because there's a lack of care up the chain.
One supplier sends 1" black out which is wrapped with its bare wood back surface packed against the black top face of the next length. In the pack of four lengths three are useless. The lengths obviously shuffle against each other and scuff the black leaving shiny bits and other marks. Only the top length is undamaged.
Do you get the same problem?
Who do you use that actually seems to care?

There is one repair you could try out.
Buy some Liberon Burnishing Cream. Rub it on with a cotton cloth and keep rubbing until the mark disappears.
After leaving it to dry, clean away the residue with some cotton wool and buff up the surface a bit.
Now use some 0000 wire wool to dull and blend the repair to the rest of the moulding.
Even though it is a factory finish, a light wax on the whole moulding would hide any remaining blemish.

I hate them. I had a girl in today who wanted a poster framed in a black frame. My usual strategy is to create one of my]
'pet' finishes by using black acrylic gesso applied so that there is a lot of random criss-cross brushmarks, which makes an interesting
texture and also makes it less susceptible to marks. It already is marked. But Oh No she wanted it smooth and flat. OK, I could
do it but it would take more sanding and general embuggerance and one cross look would make a blemish. As for using a factory moulding,
that would mean sourcing it, buying it in and using maybe 3 times more than it should require to get four good bits. Also, there wouldn't be
the nice blended corners and it would soon look tatty.

That was one job I was not sorry to see go out the door......

I was taught many years ago to rub over the marked finish on such moulding with duraglit. It does restore the uniformaty of the finish, but at the expense of making a matt black finish into a gloss finish. So not entirely sucessful! I have struggled quite a lot with black factory finished mouldings, without much success. I much prefer hand finishing my own basic black mouldings. I have not found a helpful way of avoiding these problems when using these basic black mouldings. Also a lot of narrow black factory finished mouldings are also finger jointed rubbish under the surface these days.

If black moulding has a mark I give the whole length a rub with white spirit. If it doesn't fix it then it's a goner.
When I get my mouldings they are in packs of 2 and they face each other, I'm not sure why anyone would stack them on top of each other.
Have you tried complaining to the supplier?
I assume they are refunding you or resending if there is damage so it can't be much fun for them either.

I use these https://www.lionpic.co.uk/p/9168/Plasti ... ine-2-pads or the ones on the back of washing up sponges, wet thwm and very gently rub the full lenght of the moulding, works a treat