Making Simply Picture Frames

In this video I make some simple custom sized picture frames for my brother.  He sent me the dimensions, there were five in total.
 
He wanted them spray painted black which is a good thing for two reasons – firstly I could use some scraps of wood that I had piling up in the workshop that don’t match, as the paint will disguise that. And secondly, my usual method of making frames using my frame spline jig is a little bit more time consuming than what I planned to do to make these ones - which is just to use wood glue and regular brad nails to assemble the frames together. 
 
I got started by ripping various scraps of wood to be 25mm square until I had a pile that looked big enough to make 5 frames.  Some of the pieces I used had rough sawn faces, or edges that weren’t perfectly straight, or they were dirty – so I cut off any of those bits that were no good.
 
Now that I had lots of lengths which are 25mm square, I wanted to cut a rebate joint that will be 12mm by 12mm down the length of each piece, and I did that on the tablesaw.  I set the blade height to 12mm using my calipers, and I set my table saw fence at 9mm because the thickness of the kerf of my tablesaw blade is 3mm – so that will give me a 12mm x 12mm cut.
 
Next I made a 45 degree mitre cut on one end of each piece at the mitre saw.
 
To assemble the frames, I applied wood glue to the mitre joints and held the corners together temporarily with a piece of tape.  I used speed square to check for squareness, and then I could fire in a couple of brad nails on each side of each corner of the frame.  The glue would do most of the work to hold the frame together, and the nails will act as a clamp until the glue sets and also add a bit of extra strength too.  
 
Once the glue had dried, I peeled off all the tape,  added some filler to the nail holes and then sanded all of the edges flush. 
 
I got some black spray paint from the pound shop, and used that to spray the frames black.
 
I used Perspex for these frames because I had some already, it was 6mm thick which is way thicker than needed, but it’s what I had so that’s what I used.
 
I measured up the internal dimensions and cut the Perspex to size on the tablesaw and then I could slot it in place.
 
Then I could cut some sheet material for the back of each frame to the same size as the perspex, and I had a mixture of some scraps of hardboard and plywood in the workshop, so I used a bit of both.
 
I used some framing pins to hold the backs in place.  

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