Welcome to make something
with me. David Picciuto. And today I going to show you
how to make oval picture frames Today I'm going to show you how to make
oval picture frames including how to draw the ovals and how to
mount and protect your artwork. I want to cut out an oval out of
some acrylic. You can buy oval glass, you can cut oval glass. Today we're going to use acrylic
so we can cut it on the bandsaw. Going to draw a line down the middle
of this guy and then somewhere down the middle here, this is going to
fit within an eight by 10 photo. So we need half of both of those
numbers. So we need four and five. Remember those numbers from that
center point. Make a Mark at four. Then from that 4 inch mark we are going
to measure five inches back to that middle line. And then
another one over here. We have our three points right
there, right there, right there.
I'm just going to CA glue a couple of
little bolts on here and I'm going to go just inside my marks cause I want
it to fit within an eight by 10. Between our three points we
are going to tie a string, can cut this extra off and then we
can also remove this one right there. So now we can take our pencil. How cool is that? Is just under eight and just under 10 we can
cut this out at the bandsaw. I'm going to work this out on some paper. I know that there's going to be a rabbet about a quarter of an inch on the inside. And I know I want the frame to be, oh, let's say that wide. So we want four mitered pieces of
wood that that oval can fit into. So let's say drawing some miters in
there will kind of give us a little rough estimate of what we need. 10 and a half by 12 and
that is around three inches.
I got this piece of walnut
from my friends at Kencraft. We're going to cut this to with and then
we're going to cut the miters over at the mitersaw. I'm marking the tops of all my
pieces here. Before we glue this up, I want to cut some splines
to reinforce these joints, so I have my blade set to just under half
the thickness and if I run it through this way, I've got that blade
almost dead center on this board, so I'm going to run all the miters
through having the top face that way.
This is one of the cutoffs
from the miter saw. I'm going to use that for a little bit
of extra support as I run that through. And then as well as having a paddle on
there to keep my hands free and safe from the blade. So one pass on all the miters make sure
the tops of the boards are all facing that way. [inaudible] so we have all of our miter slots
cut. If you're new to the table salt, it's kind of a dangerous cut because if
the board slips it could kick back and hit you in the face.
You can also do this at the router or
you can make a jig to hold the boards as you're running it through there. So just keep that in mind
when you're making that cut. The next thing I need to do is cut a
piece of Walnut that's going to fit in the slot. It took me a couple of tries. The first one I made was a little
too thick and then the second pass, perfect dead on. If you have a drum
sander or just a random orbit sander, you could take the one that's a
little too thick and sand that down, but we nailed it on our second try. We're going to glue in our splines
and glue the whole thing together. You could chop off the edges of
the splines and use a band clamp. The glue is dry. I've
taken it out of the clamps. I've also marked a center
line on all four pieces. I've got our original oval and
it still has the marks on there. So I'm going to center this on here, kind of line up all those marks and
then just trace that oval on here.
So now we need to come in one quarter of
an inch and that's going to give us the inside lip of the oval and then give us
enough room to create a rabbet to hold the glass. And to do that, I have my compass and I'm just going to
kind of trace along that line freehand.
So now to cut off that inside,
I'm going to use my jigsaw. The right blade for
this is very important. I've got a 10 teeth per inch for hardwood
that's going to give us a nice clean cut. I've also got my
orbital setting set to zero. That's a less aggressive cut and that's
going to do perfectly fine on this 3/4 inch walnut. This jigsaw has a speed control, so if it's cutting a little too fast
for you and you're having a hard time controlling it, you can slow it down.
I'm going to take this over to my
spindle sander and send that clean. If you don't have a spindle
sander, you can get those, those little drum sanders for your
drill press or your hand drill to smooth that out. So now that
the inside is all sanded, smooth. I need to create a little rabbit for
our acrylic and our artwork to sit in. So I have a rabbiting bit in my compact
router here and that's going to give us a quarter inch rabbet all the way around. I'm going to do it in two passes just
so I'm removing just a little bit of material at a time.
You might
be able to do it in one pass, but I'm playing it safe. So that is the first pass. Now I'm going to do a second
pass and go a little bit deeper. No, we had that rabbet cut. Your
acrylic should fit in there like so. If it doesn't, you can sand that down. So we're going to flip this over to the
other side and route a profile with a roman ogee bit. That inside profile routed back to my
compass and I'm going to draw the outside perimeter and then once again you can
cut that out with a jigsaw or a bandsaw.
I want to do a nice round
over along the edge there. So I got it a round over bit. The problem with using this little
compact router is now there's not enough surface space and I don't want it
to wander on me and ruin the piece, so I'm going to do it
over at the router table. Another option is to take off this
plastic acrylic piece that came with the router and put on a bigger one and then
I'll give you more space to reference. You've got all kinds of
options I'm to use the router. Now, we're just putting
a coat of wax on there. I'm going to show you how to Mount
your artwork and seal that off, but first I have two businesses I have
make something which you're watching here and I also have my podcast called making
it with Jimmy and Bob and both of our websites are run on Squarespace for
10 years. I was a web developer. I could go ahead and make my own website, but I choose to use Squarespace and I
was using Squarespace before they were a sponsor.
I sell digital and
physical products on my website, so PDF plans for the projects that
you see here and I saw my merch. You can do the same thing.
It's super easy to set up. I don't have to worry about downtime or
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take a look at their templates. You're going to have a beautiful website
right off the bat with very little effort, and if you're someone like
me who can dive into the code, you can do that as well,
but I choose not to.
I want to focus on making videos and
not spending all my time working on my website. One of the things that's hard to do as
a web developer is to make your website look good on a computer as
well as a phone and a tablet. It has to reformat itself to that size
screen. That's called responsive design. Squarespace sites automatically do that, so please check out squarespace.com for
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Thank you Squarespace for being a long
time sponsor of this channel and allowing me to do what I do. All right. Let's
get back to these picture frames. I have this photo of a tree that I took
a few years ago and I'm going to take my acrylic over top of that. We also need a board for the back. If you're going to be doing
a lot of picture framing
and if you're a woodworker, you probably are. Get yourself of
these guys because check this out. Look how easy that is. If you
don't have one of these guys, I've got another video about picture
framing on how to get a nail in there. You can seal that off by using
some craft paper and cut that out. Cut it out, cut it out.
Every time I do this with an X-acto knife,
I'm so close to chopping my head off. Now, we need to add a little little
bumper, a little bump and grind action. Press those guys on there. I've got other videos on picture frame
making including making a miter sled and a spline jig over at the table saw. I'll have links to those down
below that wraps this video up. We'll see you next week with a brand new
project. As always, be safe, have fun, stay passionate, and make something..