The Home Picture Framers Paradise!

How To Frame Pictures and
Make Picture Frames

by Reimond Grignon

How to make custom picture frames? You can do it! You can learn how to frame pictures and make picture frames just like the professionals do with just a little practice and determination, I am going to tell and show you how on this online picture framing school. I am even going to reveal some secrets about putting picture frames together that the pro's don't want you to know. It is easy so lets get started!

First you need a little back ground information so that you can understand the processes involved. Many people write me about the possibility of buying long length moulding from me so that they can make their own frames. What they don't realize is that most of the frame shops around the country don't even do this! There are too many things wrong with buying molding this way. Let me explain. We buy long length moulding because we deal wholesale in moldings. To do this we order moldings by the box lot full, hundreds of feet of the same style of moulding in each box, and these are shipped to us by tractor trailer. It certainly does not make sense for the average person to do this, nor even for most of the picture frame shops operating in this country. For one thing, what frame shop would want to stock hundreds of feet of the same style moulding that may never be sold. Many of these boxes of molding cost over $1000.00 each. Multiply this by a couple of hundred mouldings or more and you got a big inventory problem.

 

Another problem many people don't realize is that length moulding ordered this way has a 20 percent waste factor when you go to cut it into picture frames. Sometimes more, and unless you have a great deal of experience, moulding brought this way can become very costly. I have seen many ten foot pieces of molding that had only four feet of usable molding in it.

Another problem with the small framer ordering length moulding is that is has to be shipped by tractor trailer. This is very costly. Length mouldings cannot be shipped by mail or ups. So, what do the majority of picture frame shops in this country do? They order chops and do not have to worry about any of these problems or worry about the waste factor, because with chops, there is no waste factor. Nor do they have to stock moldings which may not sell which is a huge problem.

What is a chop? When you walk into a custom frame shop to have a picture framed, the framer shows you many moulding samples on his wall. Usually, he does not actually have these moldings in stock at his place of business. When you buy a picture frame from the custom framer, the framer orders the "chop" from a wholesale dealer who cuts/chops the molding to the exact size the custom framer wants, and ships it to the framer and the framer puts the frame together. This is how at least 90 percent or more of the frame shops in this country operate. Now here on this web site you can do the exact same thing! You can order the exact same "chops" from us that the professional customer framer orders, then just like him, you can put the frame together. Which brings us to the how to frame pictures information.

After deciding on the frame you want, you have to know the exact size of the frame you need before ordering it. You must be correct because there are no returns or refunds allowed on cut picture frame molding from any supplier. Even the professional shops cannot return a cut molding. That is why they charge a 50 % deposit. To cover their loss if the customer doesn't pick up the finished picture.

What you have to order is the exact "glass size" you need. If you need a frame that a piece of 16 by 20 glass fits into, then that is what you order, a 16 by 20 frame. We will cut the moulding slightly over size so that this piece of 16 X 20 glass or whatever, will fit into the frame after you put the frame together. This is all done for you automatically by us. You don't have to do any figuring. This is the way all custom frame shops order their frames. You just have to do the same. You have to be careful with painted canvases. Sometimes these are not square. For example, for a 16 by 20 canvas, you may actually have to order a 16 1/4 by 20 1/8 inch frame, so that the canvas will "drop" into the frame after the frame is put together, because the canvas corners were not "square". Usually this does not happen, but you must be aware of this fact, because when you put one of our frames together, the corners will be exactly "square". You can order any size of picture frame chop from us.

 

When you order the frames from us the pieces of moulding will be cut on a professional picture frame chopper. Then the pieces are carefully wrapped and shipped to you via UPS. The chopper that we use is a heavy duty built piece of machinery. The head and cutter blades are built from a very heavy piece of metal. The moulding lays along side of the head and the blades come down and slice through the wood like butter. The head and blades are locked at exactly ninety degrees. The heavy head and blades cannot move and the corners are cut exact every time. What you receive will be four pieces of moulding with the corners all cut for you. All you have to do is put the four corners together and you have just completed a picture frame.

 

How to put picture frames together

Open the package when you receive it from us and you will find the four pieces of molding wrapped up in paper. Take these pieces and being very careful not to drop them on the floor, (they always seem to land on their ends damaging the ends) sort the pieces into two long and two short sides.

Then A professional will use one of the special corner markers we sell, and mark the ends of all four molding pieces. Only a slight mark along the top cut edge is needed. You should do the same thing, it makes a big difference as to the looks of the finished frame.

You will need to have one of our framers corner clamps screwed to your work bench. Without a corner vise you will find it almost impossible to put a picture frame together.

Put the longer piece of moulding on the right side of the vise and lightly clamp it into position. Do the same with the shorter piece in the left side of the clamp allowing the corners to come together. You MUST always put the long pieces on the right side and the shorter pieces on the left side. You must remember to do this ALWAYS so that your picture frame will come together properly. If you mess up, you will find it impossible to put the frame together. You might want to mark the corners of your clamp so that you will remember to do this.

 

Now "Work" the pieces of the mouldings until the corners come together in the vise perfectly. The only difference between you and a professional is that a pro knows how to "work" the corners. This is one of those little secrets I told you about. Many times the corners all go together great but sometimes you have to "work" them. That may mean twisting one side or the other of the frame until it fits perfectly. It may mean putting a piece of paper on the backside of the frame to cause the clamp to put a twist on the frame so that it goes together perfectly. A professional knows how to do this and almost never has to re-cut a frame. You can learn to do the same thing in a short amount of time. A tip: try to get one side of the frame about exact and then try to do most of the "working" on the other piece only. Also be careful not to drop a corner. It happens often on the first few frames you do. A drop may damage the corners making it difficult to put the frame together properly.

When you have the frame corners together exactly, loosened the side of the frame that you worked on the least, put our corner glue on that side and and pushing the corner back into place clamp the frame pieces together and wipe off the excess glue with a paper towel. Let this set up in your vise for at least fifteen minutes, then carefully remove the two glued pieces and lay them down on your work bench. Don't play with them! Now work and glue the other two pieces of your picture frame together, remembering to keep the long piece of molding on the right side of the vise. Again allow the glue on these two pieces to set up for at least fifteen minutes.

After removing these second two pieces from the corner vise, put both glued pieces into position and glue together the third side of the picture frame. You should really let this glued third side sit up for thirty minutes because this is the side that is going to take the largest strain of putting the frame together. Be patient.

After letting the third glued side sit up long enough, take the frame pieces out of the corner vise and try to put the forth side together. Hopefully this will go well as it almost always does. Because this is the forth side, all mistakes in putting the frame together so far will be compounded in this corner. Just be patient and work the frame. Remember, a professional will almost never have to re-cut a frame. They make the corner go together almost every time. Hopefully your first frames will go together well and you will see sweet success right off the bat!

 

There are cases though where after all best efforts are given, a corner won't go together. It happens to even the best of us. Remember, even a professional frame shop cannot return a chop to the distributor, so what to do? He will re-cut the corner. I will show you how to do this. (It is easier to do if you haven't glued the corner yet. If you have I would advise letting the glue in the corner dry first.)

We are going to say that your corner is in the corner vise and there is a gap showing that you don't like after all attempts to fix it have failed. Tighten the vise so that both sides of the frame are tightened down securely. Then take a common hack saw and starting on top of the frame cut down into the corner of the frame exactly on the corner. Follow the joint line as best as you can trying to cut the same amount off both sides of the frame. After this process, you must loosen the vise and remark the corners of the frame with the corner markers again, then proceed to put the fourth side of the frame back together.

 

The corner should now fit correctly, although once in a long while I have had to cut a frame corner this way twice. Glue the corner, let set up for thirty minutes before removing. You should be able to put together a frame this way in a little over an hours time. With two vises you can only shorten the time by just fifteen minutes. The reason pros have lots of vises is so that they can work on more frames at once. Hopefully you will end up with a frame with glued corners with little trouble. I usually can put together one hundred to two hundred frames with out ever having to re-cut one. Actually, I can't even remember the last time I did have to re-cut one!

 

 

Keep in mind I just put the above information here so that you will have it if necessary. The chops you receive will be very accurate, you just need to learn how to "work" the corners. Practice makes perfect and you will find putting frames together lots of fun. The professional vise that we sell is much easier to put picture frames together with but you can do it with the smaller vise easy enough, as has been shown. The pro vise is made for putting together picture frames and is almost useless for putting other kinds of moldings together.

Your not done yet! Your nice glued frame needs to be nailed together. I know a number of professional frame shops that still use regular picture framing nails to nail the frames together. This is done while the mouldings are still in the professional vise. Most frame shops today use V-nails to nail the frames together. We do the same thing in our shop. V nails hold lots better than regular nails and produce a much sturdier frame. Professionally made frames are glued together first, just as I have told you. Then they are v-nailed together using a v- nailing machine. The cheaper common frames you see in department stores are usually put together without glue (the time factor) and less v- nails. That is the reason these frames usually don't have good corners.

V-nailing machines are expensive costing many thousands of dollars. There are people making smaller machines for home framers. These cost a few hundred dollars. Now I am going to tell you a little known secret that all these company's don't want you to know. You don't need Them! That is right, I am going to show you how to v- nail a frame together without the use of any of these machines! You will need a perfectly smooth bench top with a sturdy leg under your working corner. This bench top is going to have to be really smooth so that you don't mess up your nice frame. If it is not, purchase a piece of Formica or something like that, about two feet square and place that on the corner of your bench, directly over one of the bench legs. Otherwise, if your bench top is maybe just passable, at least cover it with just five sheets of newspaper. Five sheets work well, too much newspaper pads the frame too much. You need smooth, firm, and sturdy.

Place your now glued frame upside down on your bench top (face side down) with one corner of the frame directly over your bench tops leg. You are now looking at the bottom of your frame. Using our case hardened - hand drivable V nails, notice that one side of the v- nails have a paper backing and look darker than the other sides. This side of the v- nails have been glued together somewhat, to hold the nails together. This glued side is the "sharp" side. Remember that!

 

Separate with your finger nails, three or four of these v nails and pull them off the leaf. Using the needle nose pliers, hold the sharp edge of the v nails against the wood of the frame as shown in the pictures and using our framing hammer just pound them into the frame. You will find this very easy to do. The nails drive good as long as you have the sharp sides down. Tip: if looking down at the v nails, and you don't see the "edge" of the nail, your looking at the sharp side and you need to turn it over.

You should place at least two hand driveable v nails into each corner in a any molding, three nails in a 1 1/2 inch moulding and four nails in a two inch moulding. They hold well, that and the glue and you got a nice solid picture frame. Nail all four corners of your picture frame this way and your done.

You can see why you need a smooth bench top, so that you don't damage the front side of your picture frame. To see V-nails on our order page click here.

When you get your frame glued and dried you will later have to nail it. But here I want to give you lesson about glue. Using the proper glue will make your job so much easier. When you come to nail the frame together, if you haven't used the right glue, you might have the frame corner come apart on you. If that happens you will find it quite difficult to remove the v nails and redo your frame. The only way to get v nailes out of a corner is to use and awl and dig in and pry them out. It is so much nicer to not have to re-do the corner. I am not trying to make a sales pitch on using our glue, BUT, it does work great! The common wood glues found in most stores just don't work good on picture frames corners. In fact they fail miserably. Using them you will find some of your frame corners coming apart when nailing them together. The glue we sell is made special for corners and holds very well.. Please read more about our glue on this link.

There are some moldings that are very, very difficult to work with. All the moldings that we sell on this web site have been hand picked by me to be easy to work with, easy to glue and nail. The mouldings that I sell are also hand picked to be easy to repair, usually with just the picture frame marking pens we sell. Some companies mouldings have a finish on them that just plain refuses to take stains and are almost impossible to repair easy. I have over time eliminated these from our operation.

Building your own frames this way is very much fun and mentally rewarding. Even though I have an expensive v-nailing machine, I have v-nailed by hand many hundreds of picture frames. Sometimes just for the fun of it, and sometimes because I didn't want to bother with starting the compressor that feeds my v-nailing machine. I have also v-nailed at least one picture together, by hand this way, to test every single moulding that I sell to make sure you can do easily.

It don't cost much in time and materials to try out my system of putting picture frames together. You really should give it a try. You will find it lots of fun! It is no where as difficult as you might think it is. Most frames go together very easily and you will find our chops to be easy to put together. I also know for a fact that you can put your picture frames together faster than the time you have spent reading all this. I have just tried to be very thoughal here so that I answer as many questions as possible in this article as I can. You probably have more questions. What you need to do is try this system out a couple of times and if you are at all even a little bit of a builder you will figure out the rest. I hope you have had fun learning about picture framing on this online picture framing school.

Here's to you having lots of fun making frames,

Sincerely, Reimond Grignon

 

A Common Question I receive

"Is there a special tool to apply the "precision sharp V-shaped wedge"? Intend to use on picture frame corners and wish to avoid hammering."

Yes there are machines made that insert these wedges. Good ones cost about $3500.00 to $9000.00. There are a few cheaper ones on the market, and some used ones.

We offer our case hardened - hand driveable v nails here for the home framer to use by just pounding them in. If the frames are glued first, it works great, much better than nails. The hand driveable v nails we sell aren't suitable and won't work in most v nail driving machines. They are for hand driving only, by using a hammer.

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