How to Make a Custom Wood Picture Frame from Scratch

RON HAZELTON:
My friend Hugh Morton down at Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina is a wonderful nature photographer and he just sent me this photo of one of the bears at the park down there. Now I was going to take this down to a frame shop and have it professionally framed. And then I thought, you know what, this is a perfect workshop project -- custom making a frame.

So that's exactly what we're going to do right over here at the workbench. So come on over. We're going to build our frame out of poplar. I picked this up at the local home improvement center, and we'll be using three different thicknesses -- 3/4 inch, 1/2 inch and 1/4 inch.

So the first thing I want to do is rip this down to the proper width. Now to round over this piece of wood, we're going to use this router bit called a roundover bit. It will mount into the router like this and the router in turn is held in this router table. Now come on under here and take a look.

This is just a standard router clamped upside down. Now normally with a router, you move the router over the work, but when you're using a router table, you're passing the work over the router. Now this is going to form the base of our molding, our picture frame, if you will.

And what we're going to do next is we're going to stack on top of this, just a smaller piece of lumber. This is the 1/2 inch thick. It's going to go right on top, just like that. I'll just put some glue on the bottom. Now, I want to get this nice and evenly spread out.

So we'll take a glue spreader and just kind of paint this on here. So what we end up with is a nice even film of glue. Now we'll take this, plop it right on top of that piece that we just finished routing there. I'm going to make it flush with the back. Then we'll take some spring clamps, put one of these every few inches. This is the last one right here. Okay. Now we'll set this one aside to dry and we'll do up a few more, just like this.

Well, the glue's dried, the clamps are off, here's that piece that we attached. Now this is what I want to do next. Remove this little piece of material right in here. It's going to actually create kind of an S-curve. And to do that, we're going to use this core box bit.

You can see right there how that's going to work. That's going to remove this material. Now see what a graceful S-curve that makes? Now I've installed a straight bit on the router and I'm cutting out a rabbit or a recess on the back side of the frame.

This notch will hold the glass and photograph in place, and conceal the edges. Well, this is the third piece of board in our sort of molding sandwich, if you will. This is going to sit right on the top. And what I want to do is to create a rounded edge on this. So I've set up our router table once again for our final routing.

This is a little round-over bit in here. Now this is a very thin piece of wood, so I've added a couple of blocks here and here to hold this in position, keep it from chattering and allow me to keep my fingers well away from the blade.

Let's go ahead and run this through twice --once in this direction, then we'll flip it over and run it through the other direction. There you go. See how the round shape is carried around the entire edge?

Well, now we're ready to glue our third piece of molding on top of our stack of moldings, if you will, to give us a very interesting profile right here. So let's do the same thing we did before. We'll take some glue --
[MUSIC]
Well, here's our molding. A very nice looking profile we've got right here.

Now I need to cut angles or miters on the ends of each section. To do that more accurately, I'm using the miter gauge for the table saw, to which I've attached a wood strip as an extension. I'm also using a stop block to make sure the sections on opposite sides of the frame are exactly the same length.

Finally, we have some finished frame parts right here. We're going to glue these together right now. And I've made up a simple gluing jig right here with a piece of particle board or MDF and then on top of that, a square -- I made sure that this was exactly square just screwed in place, just a few inches in from the edge. So what we're going to do is take our molding, put a little glue on the end of the miter cut here -- I've got a pretty generous coat of glue on this. Because this is end grain, it tends to soak the glue up.

Now we'll take this piece, lay it up against the block, take the adjoining piece, lay it up against that edge and then push these two together. Now you see what the block does? The block makes certain that we have a 98-degree angle here.

We're adding the pin nailer here and I'm going to nail this first from this side -- and then from this side over here, and this one, and then we're just going to repeat the process. And folks, we have got a frame. Pretty as a picture, huh? And how about this portrait?

Well, I've put some stain and a couple of coats of varnish on this and I'd say it's time to make this picture perfect. So we're going to take a piece of glass first of all, and drop this right into that rabbit that we cut earlier -- get it in there and here's our photograph. Put a mat around the outside edge of that, drop that right on top of the glass just like so.

We'll hold the photo, mat and glass into the rabbit we cut earlier, with these glazier's points, used by glass installers to hold windowpanes in place. To protect the back and keep dust out, we'll attach a sheet of brown craft paper with masking tape.

Well, there it is. You know, making your own frame can add a very personalized touch to something that's special to you.