Well Stacked

[JohnMcafee]

I have been asked to construct a stacked frame using around 15 mouldings from our range. The inner aperture is 500x500mm, and the outside dimension to be in the 1400 to 1600mm range.

The customer would like it to be fairly flat, so not really a stacked frame in the normal sense.

I'm thinking of laying the concentric frames on a sheet of plywood, with the centre hole cut out, and securing them by screwing through from the back.

But is there a better way?

WellStacked.jpg (230.58 KiB) Viewed 4337 times

[birdman]

That sounds like a simple solution to me John. The tricky part is making sure the screws hit the wood underneath and not the rebate gaps but it should work OK.

That's a lot of frame for £20!

[prospero]

Sound like a good plan to me on the face of it. Doing it could be a tad more problematic.

15 frames = 60 rails. 5(?) screws in each rail. That's a lot of screwing.

Can you get ply 1400 sq? Might have to use strips.

[The Jolly Good Framer #1]

I’m thinking 4 strips of 1/8” ply about 4” wide running from inside corner to outside corner if you are going to use ply. 1 whole sheet could get quite weighty and as peter said 1400 x 1400mm is going to be wider than a standard sheet of ply so it would also start getting costly.

I think I would be looking in to using 3mm MDF cut in two halves to get it out of 2 large sheets. Screwed to the frames the combined strength of the frames and MDF would be plenty strong enough and wouldn’t be over heavy or too costly. Also easy to cut to size.

Might as well be worth staining the MDF a dark colour just in case your frames don’t quite butt up and you see the MDF through the gaps.... but being a master frame maker I’m sure yours will perfect!

[JohnMcafee]

"but being a master frame maker"
Ooooooh nooooo!
I've been outed.

Many thanks for the input guys. I think I'm favouring the plywood strips.

However, the customer is mulling over his grand idea at the moment, perhaps he thought that it would be less expensive

[Grahame Case]

I quite often find that people always have these grand ideas but are not always willing to pay to have them done!

[Not your average framer]

If you want to do it to a lower price, you could consider using a plain wood moulding throughout and staining each frame a different colour before assembling them all together.

I am assuming that you already have suitable wood stains and paints on hand, otherwise there won't be any saving. One possible choice of barewood moulding could be Simons PIN-0026 and as it's only 20 pence per foot, there's still good potential for profit.

When I'm less busy, I might do a frame like this to display in the window and see if it attracts any interest. It's something different and who knows it might start something.