On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:43:02 GMT, Lobster
wrote:

Am thinking of having a go at making a large-ish wooden frame for a
print that She's just bought... can't believe the cost that she was
quoted to have it supplied framed.

Get a quote for framing it. Framers are cheaper than print shops.

Also look at buying a ready-made frame from Hobbyworld, or else their
range of frame mouldings. They're actually a very good range and well
priced. They're almost certainly the best place to buy mounting board.

http://amol.org.au/recollections is a museum conservation web site with
good advice on matting and mounting. Searching Wikipedia for "Canons of
page construction" (renaissance typography) will give some useful advice
on laying out a matt too.

I was thinking of buying some lengths of moulding from Wickes,

Any mouldings other than real picture frame mouldings look terrible. Get
the good stuff -- or else make your own, if you have a router. Don't
make the back rebate too shallow either - commercial framers with flat
darts can work in less space than you can with pins.

mitring the ends and sticking them together. Is that about it?

Yes. Ideally mitre them with a chainsaw, then shave them accurately to
fit with a framer's guillotine. Good work always uses some sort of knife
edge to trim them after sawing oversize, not a crap fancy magic saw from
Happy Shopper. I have a guillotine (vast cast-iron thing), you can use a
block plane and a shooting block or you can use a very sharp paring
chisel and a couple of pencil lines drawn on a scrap of wood beneath.
Aim for about 44 1/2° acute -- you can hide a whisker of a gap on the
inside far more easily than the same gap on the outside.

For glue, you need something with high initial tack and strong shear
resistance. Titebond is good. PVA isn't.

For clamping, just use a well-supported _flat_ plywood layout board (or
the best dining table) and a string clamp around the outside. Make
yourself a set of corner blocks first - 3" MDF circles with a grooved
circumference and a smidgen less than a quarter sawn out. Face
everything relevant with plastic sticky tape, to avoid glue-up
accidents. Use a simple string loop windlass and a twisted stick to
tighten up. Measure both diagonals to check.

Cut the backing board (grey mounting card) to fit loosely inside the
rebate, then take it to the glazier as a pattern for cutting. Don't cut
the glass beforehand, or Sod's Law will bite you. Write "Return this, I
need it" prominently on one side! Don't cut it too tight though, unless
both you and the glazier are capable of working to that accuracy. It's
safer to actually give them a pattern piece 1mm-2mm undersize and to use
a wide rebate.

Glass is either 3mm or 2mm (usually to order) and is cheap. Make sure
it's not scratched! A good, careful glazier is getting hard to find (I
recommend Roman Glass on Stokes Croft, Bristol)