Day: September 14, 2021

This is not really a frame shop journal – it’s just a thing that happened at work today.

We got this frame that we’d ordered, so I set to put it together. The company that provides us with the pre-cut frames, Larson-Juhl (incidentally owned by Berkshire Hathaway AKA bazillionaire Warren Buffet) always cuts these nice little slots into the corners of the wooden frames, which are a standardized size to receive these little plastic wedge thingies. You just pound them in, and everything is so precisely cut that the corner has a nice, neat, ideal join.

But this time, the wedge shapes were different than the standard. The standard plastic wedge thingies wouldn’t fit. And they hadn’t sent us any alternate wedge thingies to slip into the slots at the corners.

I was stymied. Then, being far too clever for my own good, I decided I could make my own. I carved them out of bits of scrap wood I had lying around. And in fact, they fit in very nicely, and did a good job.

In this picture, you can see a frame corner, with my custom wooden wedge thingy making the join, and a standard plastic wedge thingy standing nearby for comparison – it looks like a little brown plastic Star Wars TIE Fighter.

Unfortunately, this ended in disaster. As soon as I inserted the picture and glass, and began applying the special staples to hold everything in, the corner wood bits cracked. I tried to salvage my clever connectors with a bit of super glue, but the super glue seeped onto the front side of the frame and corroded the fine, smooth finish of the frame. Result: frame ruined, and 4 hours wasted, and we have to re-order the frame (hopefully this time they’ll either use the standard cut, or send us new, correctly-sized wedge thingies).