framing puzzles

[Smallpatch]

I cut enough wood to make two puzzle frames at a time. The waste I cut out for the groove is saved to attach the picture into the frame. Oh yea, the first angle I cut I have the piece of the frame right side up so when you cut the piece upside down on the saw table to the exact length you will be able to see where you need to make the cut.....once you make a few frames you will see what I mean.

 I use 1x4's and cut them in two. This is ruff cedar trim I'm using.

No matter what size you make, the corners will fit perfect if each two pieces are exactly the same length. This is an old set of Sears angle clamps I've had for about 60 years and they also need to be perfect. If they are not perfect your angles will show the poor fit....

  The good thing of using these angle clamps is after you do a trial fit without glue and are satisfied then you can take one side at a time out to apply the glue without changing the clamped angles. You glue the two corners, check with a square then turn the frame around and take out the other end piece without changing any angles from being square... After this dries, all this glue does is hold the frame together while I cut the slots in to each corner for a piece of 1/8" bb plywood.

  Maybe I don't have to mention this but when taking a piece of wood out of the clamps to apply glue only loosen one screw on two different clamps..... well duh!!

 After I cut the slot in each corner I then slip the 1/8" piece in and draw a line on each side and use the scroll saw to cut the pieces out.

  Then I treat the frame like any other piece when finishing like here I picked up some of the colors from the picture so it might look like it was made only for this Kincade fake painting. It still needs a few coats of clear for this cedar is hell for splinters..  

  Tip, not all blades are exactly the right size  for the BB 1/8" plywood and out of about 60, 10" saw blades only one suited me for the tightness when inserted in to the groove, so it gets a few identification marks all over this blade so it only gets used for the BB plywood...I use to make a few frames each week when Bernadette was younger and feeling her oats....

 

 

Then the .23 pin nailer is perfect for attaching the strips of wood back in to their original slots.

 

Its also advisable to use a glue that dries clear over the front of the puzzle..  I do use wax paper under the puzzle before I apply the glue and after the front dries I flip the puzzle over and glue a piece of cardboard to the back and then weight it down  with 1/2" plywood on top weighted down with a large bowl of pecans.

 That is this puzzle being glued up under the plywood and pecans and we have already started another puzzle which is better than walking around outside in the cold..

[Gunny]

Nice work. Matching the frame to the picture is a good practice. You want the frame to enhance the picture. Not be the focal point.  

[Artie]

That is cool, combining your work to make something nice.

[lew]

Those are some tight corners!

 

My Mom recently had to move to assisted living. Wasn't enough room in her new place to keep all of the puzzles we framed.They all went to the local thrift shop

[Gerald]

Nice tutorial. Jess I thought you said all the walls were covered. I see more clear space next to those top windows

[Cal]

Great tips on frame making Jess.  How is Bernadette doing since her surgery?

[Smallpatch]

Cal we still haven't gone back to see the doc that did the procedures yet , Last Wed was the appointment and she changed the time as it was snowing so now we go back this Thursday...She is in her shop every day but I don't check on her in there so she might have a bed to crawl in to instead of doing stained glass??  We still don't know if they sent anything away to be checked but what he told us in the hospital is all we know. Then she works the puzzles till bed time.

   Does your area catch much snow..?  It snowed about half as much last week as the pictures I posted and those two sessions were probably more than our average for the past years. It did get around 23 one night but usually stays in the lower 30's on the coldest nights and is usually in the upper 50's on the coldest days... I would rather read about the idiots having wrecks on those slick roads than me getting out there and contributing to some.

  We are real happy the snow birds go past us and end up in south Texas and Florida. But I'm sure the summer days we have turns off those from the north....

[Pat Meeuwissen]

Jess, if I can ask how do classify what type of frame goes with what kind of puzzle? To busy gluing to make more progress on the new one. LOL  By the way like the look of those blocks you added to the pipe clamps, I assume that's to make them all stand up easier and not to crush softer woods.

 

Edited February 10, 2020 by Pat Meeuwissen
addition

[Smallpatch]

I needed to raise the pipe clamps up so I have room underneath the wood laying on the pipes for the other jaw of the vise grip .  I built these long ago and are only used when I'm edge gluing boards for wider projects.. This picture shows better than I could tell...

I use vise grips when making these scroll saw jewelry boxes. So when I edge glue boards the pipe clamps on stilts is to get the vise grips on each side of the boards to be edge glued. 

 These drawers are about 8" deep and I use  9 clamps at a time to make sure all these pieces are pulled down tight for I glue one at a time until I get all 9 or 10 scrolled pieces glued together...I use 4 3/16" dowels between each piece so I can get all pieces lined up exactly or I might end up with very wide gaps when I finally get down to putting the drawers together... I glue up the cut outs from the body and the V18 SP vise grip is the only tool I can get to spread that wide. 

 So when I need to edge glue pieces  together to cut out the bodies I want the flat boards to line up perfectly when edge gluing and these pipe clamps I needed to raise off the table enough to get the vise grips under the boards for these special long attachments I added to some other vise grips for clamping the flat boards together while the glue is setting up. I bought some white plastic cutting boards from Walmart and attached some strips of the plastic to the inside of the clamp jaws so they would not stick to the boards being glued if glue happens to get between  the boards and the clamps.

 These are not band saw boxes. It takes about 50 times longer to make one of these and are more exact and less gaps between the drawers and the box body...   These pipe clamp stands or what ever one wants to call them are just what I needed for edge gluing so I would not have to waste a lot of wood running the glued up boards through the planer... so the clamps on each side of the boards keeps them lined up as close together as I can get them as the glue is setting up.

  If one wants to build some make sure all boards are exactly the same length then build a jig so all the holes are in the same place and I do all my edge gluing on the big table saw so every thing is flat to start with.

  I don't work with soft wood if I have to run the wood through the planer or any of the sanders or drum sanders for soft wood ruins the sand paper big time and it take too long to change paper so I only use soft wood for picture frames or small items that don't need and sanding except the small electric sanders.

   I use more vise grips than any other clamps except the black harbor freight spring clamps and I got many many of them....

[Smallpatch]

Also you asked about the size of the wood I use on the frames or the colors I choose and I want to take some pictures of more corner clamps I have and do want to show what I learned from the different clamps which are not worth owning even though they are more expensive so after I get back from the doctor tomorrow I'll give you a shout.

  As for the wood I use for puzzles, any cheap 1 x 4 cut down the middle. And the gruve in the back for the picture to lay in  is somewhere around 5/16" x  3/8".This I'm using now is some ruff cedar I bought when a lumber yard closed down and sold every thing at auction some 50 years ago. Its been stacked up real nice and straight inside for all that time.  As for the color or stain, anything you want to do to the frame and I just like to use some of the colors that are in the picture...

  And don't forget when you glue up the corners this is only temporary until you saw some slots in each corner for reinforcement of each corner... and there I use 1/8" Baltic birch plywood...and I am lucky for I have a 10" table saw blade that is exactly the right tightness for the plywood without having to sand the plywood down to fit the slot....

 After we get the puzzle put together I slide some wax paper under the puzzle then I use Elmers white glue for it does dry clear and I use a credit card to spread it into all the cracks... DON'T use Elmers yellow glue.  Sometimes it is a bugger to get the wax paper under so be careful.

  Let it dry a day or so then you can turn the puzzle over and still keep the wax paper under to puzzle.. I then glue a piece of card board to the back side of the puzzle....Walmart has this

 

The big piece in the middle will cover the back of a 1000 piece puzzle which most are 27 x 20" and you end up with the two smaller pieces and you could get enough for another puzzle but I'm not sure how gluing two pieces on the back will keep from showing the crack later on ..I did do this a time or two but can't remember if we still have those puzzles or if our kids took them home but no one has ever said their puzzle picture has fallen apart???? so I would rather use one piece of cardboard to be safe...

 

[Pat Meeuwissen]

Some fantastic looking boxes that should sell real well right now for Valentines day. Your answers were very thorough and I got it all. I guess the only thing that you didn't cover was which TYPE of frame you use with different puzzles and what makes that determination, " SWMBO??

[Cal]

21 hours ago, Smallpatch said:

Cal we still haven't gone back to see the doc that did the procedures yet , Last Wed was the appointment and she changed the time as it was snowing so now we go back this Thursday...She is in her shop every day but I don't check on her in there so she might have a bed to crawl in to instead of doing stained glass??  We still don't know if they sent anything away to be checked but what he told us in the hospital is all we know. Then she works the puzzles till bed time.

   Does your area catch much snow..?  It snowed about half as much last week as the pictures I posted and those two sessions were probably more than our average for the past years. It did get around 23 one night but usually stays in the lower 30's on the coldest nights and is usually in the upper 50's on the coldest days... I would rather read about the idiots having wrecks on those slick roads than me getting out there and contributing to some.

  We are real happy the snow birds go past us and end up in south Texas and Florida. But I'm sure the summer days we have turns off those from the north....

 

Thanks for the follow up Jess.  Please let Bernadette know that she is still in our thoughts & prayers.  It does sound like she is making a remarkable recovery though

 

Our area doesn't see much snow at all, maybe a dusting every 3-4 years and when it does happen it "usually" comes overnight and will be gone by noon.  There have been exceptions of course, and perhaps one day I will share a kinda funny story of one that happened while I was a weather man stationed here - just about 48 years ago...

Winter temps are similar to yours, but our colder days would likely be upper 40's to low 50's.

And like you, I can't think of any place I need to go when it does snow, nothing that can't wait a day or two.  And I am just about that bad when it rains, or after dark - and don't even ask me to drive in the rain after dark!

[kmealy]

One of my grand-daughters likes tigers (the animals, not some football team ;-)    She made a tiger collage puzzle last year and then asked me to frame it.   She had "mod-podged" the surface to (mostly) hold it together.  I had a bit of curly (tiger) maple that I used for the frame.  To keep the glass off the mod-podge, I matted it with black mat.  Backed it with some Foam core.  There were a few spots where the mod-podge didn't hold well, so I added some ATG tape to hold it onto the foam core.   Then added it all into the frame.   I have a "point shooter" that I use to secure the package in the frame.  Then add some kraft paper as a dust cover.  Different ways to get to the same place.   I looked into my kit where I had a gross of sawtooth hangers and found I had about six left.  Add to that the big ones that I've done with braided wire and I guess I'm closing in on 200 framed things.

[Smallpatch]

Cal we will find out the rest of the story about Bernadette's future Thursday...

 

Pat, I decided to buy more corner clamps some time ago because once in a while I needed to put frames together where the wood is wider than what these Sears clamps will handle.. only problem was when I would start to tighten the screws it would make the wood raise up off maybe a 1/4" off the clamp base....I screwed around with these things and decided what they needed was a quick type hold down clamp so I cut some metal and tapped some screw threads and mounted these clamps on the top side but nothing worked. So I ended up with about 40 bucks times 4 on these things and they are not worth nothing...…..So most of my frames are 2 1/2" wide or less and for these puzzles that's all that are needed for they don't have any weight to worry about.... But keep a picture of these clamps in your mind and stay clear of them. 

 

Pat for the puzzles this is the quickest way and cheapest to build and besides people look at the picture and not the frame. Oh I do have a comment once in a while how the frame color matches the picture but the more we put together the more I experiment with strange colors and this next frame one side is a different shade of colors than the other side more or less just to see if people notice it or mentions it... I'm still learning even though I had a furniture repair refinishing shop for a few years after I got out of the army in 1060 and I'll keep experimenting till I die...Its the only way to learn something new...

 

Pat that 20 small bottles in the background of water base colors came from Michael's and is about the cheapest thing one can buy to color wood...…. I use it straight out of the bottle and squeeze a small amount out on a plastic lid then using a short plastic brush with bristles 3/4" long gently put the brush in to the color where only 4 or 5 bristles get any color on them then paint it on the frame. This is Acrylic which is a water base color I keep repeating the process with a few colors maybe up to ten colors. I never try to cover any of the wood just to make very small streaks. I  try to keep as much of the wood show through all this playing... None of the color has time to set up so when I go to the next color and accidently hit an area where other color is and they will kinda blend in to each other and in other places I maybe not get close enough to be on top of any color so I am ending up with a rain bow of colors. but am always watching the picture so some of my messing around will look like the  colors in the picture.....

 I am about ready for the first coat of rattle can clear lacquer and if some of the areas are way too much paint and  other areas are lacking paint I let it all dry then lightly sand some of the areas.  This is how I bring it all looking like I know what I am doing.....I like to use lacquer for on a warm day I can repeat spraying more often  than any other paint. Just lightly brushing of more color where ever it is needed....let dry then spray again.You can keep doing this process all day or until you are tired or just run out of paint just make sure the water base paint is completely dry before you spray more lacquer...If you don't have lacquer then there is other types of clear you can use...

 

[Pat Meeuwissen]

So the picture you showed is the one NOT TO BUY? I bought some cheapo ones that I don't like at all. Bought two Bessey corner clamps and like them very much, I hope there is a sale soon so the other two can be purchased.

I have a ton of those acrylic bottles from when I did model train models and my wife did some painting projects.

[Smallpatch]

Correct, don't buy this kind!