Framing and safety

- This week on The Practicing Photographer, I'm standing here with Konrad Eek, inveterate framer. Konrad has produced an excellent matting and framing course, here in the library, but Konrad that was a while ago. - It has been a while. - And I know that framing's been around for hundreds of years, but still there's progress and development. - That is true. - And I wanted to talk to you today, or actually I wanted you to do most of the talking, about some tools that you started using since that course. You got some cool new gizmos here. - Yeah, what's happened over the past couple of years is I've moved from strictly buying commercially made moldings to making a lot of my own moldings.

I've gotten connected with an interior designer up in Tulsa, that I'm working at a great scale, and also some of the artists I work with have been wanting custom finishes that aren't available elsewhere. - By scale, do you mean quantity of frames or size of frames? Both. - Both, but size particularly. It's interesting when you shift to a much larger frame, a lot of things change, and I've realized now that once I get beyond about four feet in one dimension, I really need to have a helper with me. Weight becomes an issue. Handling the large glazing becomes an issue as well.

Also just the engineering problems relating to scale. The frame has to have a certain degree of strength that it wouldn't have to have otherwise. A 40 by 60 piece of glass weighs quite a bit, and so I generally work with hardwoods. When I first started, one of the issues I had, I understood the use of the dado blade, and frames are really pretty simple, it's just an L shaped piece of wood basically, where you bring the art package, the glazing and art package to the front of the L and hold it in place from behind, with some sort of mounting material.

So what I needed to do was learn how to create the L. When I first started doing it, I'd put the dado blade to the outside of the wood, and as I'd slide it through, I'd get my rabbit cut in the wood, but the blade would also be exposed, and working with hardwoods, the blade tends to push them up and away, and I was concerned about keeping all my fingers. - [Ben] Right. (laughs) - They're handy. - Yes. - So I was at a wood shop in Oklahoma City and asked for their advice, and they taught me the whole concept of a sacrificial fence, which in addition to the regular metal fence that came with the table saw, this is a couple of pieces of plywood laminated together, and then I dadoed out a channel in it to mount this.

It's a standard groove. There's grooves like that on your fence already, but I needed it raised higher so that I could accommodate the wood underneath it, and then once I'd constructed it, I wheeled it over the dado blade and just slowly raised the dado blade to carve out the sacrificial area right here. - Okay. - That's the sacrificial fence, and what it allows me to do is, I very carefully, I'll get the tape out and I'll measure how much depth I want in the dado, and so I'll position the width to make the cut properly and then adjust the height properly, and then I use these things called featherboards to hold the wood.

Instead of using my fingers, these boards are like lots of little fingers and they, I just loosen those and press down until I get a certain amount of tension, and then coming in from the side, this one operates, and I didn't get it screwed down real tight, but this one operates with manual pressure. - So it's slided into the groove. - It's slided into the groove, so I can slide it backwards and forwards, and then I just screw these tight 'til it holds. Then to set this one, you can see as I push in, do you see how these little feather parts of the board flex a little bit? So I want this to come forward to where when I get to that part of the blade, it's still holding it in, and then these are magnets that are activated by a twist.

You can see that once that's in place, it's goin' nowhere. - Wow, so there's nothing going into this groove. This is flat on the bottom, it's just... - Yeah, and they do make featherboards that work with the grooves, but I liked just the ease of operation with this, and it's interesting as a tool, it also has a board that can be bracketed to give downward pressure, but I've found that this is much more effective. - Oh really? - Yeah, these ironed angles seem to flex a little bit, and oak is hard, as is ash.

Most of the woods I work with are real hard, so they're trying to ride up away from the blade. - Okay. - So anyway, once this is all set, then I just start up the saw and gently run it through, and it allows me to keep my hands totally away from the cutting surfaces. - That's very cool. - Yeah. - Uh, these are not very expensive? - No, interestingly enough, this whole modification, including the featherboards, the channel guide, the plywood I had was scrap, but we're talking less than a hundred dollars for all of the parts, and it only took me about an hour to mill it and sand it, and get it all put together, and it just fits into a channel on the side of the original fence, and I've got three screws that I just loosen those three screws and slide that off if I just want to use the regular fence for rippin' lumber down to dimension or whatever.

- So you were saying that you're got a job where you're doing greater quantity. Does this slow you down at all? - I build, after I figured out kind of how much time it takes, I just build it into the cost per foot of the molding. You know, the first few were experimental. Luckily, I was doing one offs, so if I made a mistake, I didn't lose that much money, but you know, people are willing to pay for originality and custom work. There was one side effect that did happen as my volume started to grow, I wore a little paper breathing mask, and you know, because of the beard it didn't sit real tightly, and I was doing a substantial number of frames.

You know, I spent two full days milling oak, and ended up just from what I inhaled around the mask, with a horrible respiratory infection. - Oh boy. - Yeah, so my response to it is I got a much better breathing mask that fits real snuggly around my face, but then I also bought an air scrubber for the shop. - [Ben] Wow. - That is designed specifically to filter sawdust out of the air. Looking at the size of the garage here, it actually cycles all the air in the garage through it about six times every hour. - Wow. - Yeah, and it's made a substantial difference.

- And is that something that sits outside? - No, it's actually, it just hangs from a ceiling in the shop. - Okay. - It's nice. It's got a timer. It's a multi-speed thing, and I've just gotten in the habit, whenever I'm doing woodwork, I turn it on. - Is it noisy? - No, it's not too bad. - And not too expensive? - No, it was funny. It cost more than this, and the filters are fairly expensive, but to extend filter life, what I'll do, after a heavy working session, I'll hit it with a shop vac, and they start to fray eventually, but then I'll replace 'em, but I'll vacuum them to get more use out of 'em.

- Cool, so not that much money to actually gain a substantial amount of health and safety for? - Oh yeah, I would recommend it highly to anybody who's doing a lot of woodworking. You know sanding, table saw, whatever. You generate that sawdust. It just doesn't belong in your lungs. - Very cool. Alright, well thank you Konrad. You can check out more of Konrad's framing instructions and his courses here in the library. This is very cool. Thank you. - My pleasure. Thanks man.