New framing table!
Ξ January 8th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ General thoughts and ideas |
When framing a picture, there are two major obstacles that I have always struggled with, and that slow down production. The first, is that no matter how good a miter saw you have, it is virtually impossible to cut an exact 45 degree angle. Therefore, when you finally put all four pieces of the frame together, the corners don’t completely match up.
The second challenge is keeping those four pieces together while the glue dries. Especially with large frames, corner clamps have always proven either useless or extremely awkward and troublesome to work with.
I finally have a solution to both these problems! I built a 3′ X 4′ table that is meant solely for building picture frames.
Other than providing 12 square feet of workspace, it makes 45 degree cuts easy, and has a built-in clamp system. Grandpa Hathaway has a technique he uses to perfect angle cuts–and he uses an ordinary hand miter saw to do it! One corner of this framing table has attatchments that allow me to use his idea, making it relatively easy to ensure good contact on all four intersections of a frame.
The opposite corner of the table has removable 1X6’s that serve as walls against which a frame with wet glue will be pressed by the clamps. Although it may only hold one frame at a time, it overcomes the second obstacle mentioned above.
In addition to the table, I now have a biscuit joiner to work with, which will allow me to insert small pieces of wood into the joints of each frame, so that once the glue is dry, they hold the four corners of the frame together from the inside of the wood.
I’m trying out all this new stuff on a frame that recently broke apart. On that frame, in order to compensate for the imperfect corner cuts, I had clamped the corners together so hard, that they smashed together despite their 46 or 44 degree angles. This created a huge amount of tension all around the frame, which caused each corner to break apart (simultaneously) when it was bumped. This new equipment is specifically meant to prevent that from happening to this or any other frames (and to make frame building a whole lot easier).
One Response to ' New framing table! '
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on January 18th, 2009 at 8:36 am
You’re getting quite good at carpentry. Nice job.