Making Picture Frames Without Using Miters

If you're doing woodworking, I bet a lot of people are asking you to make them picture frames. And one of the challenges with picture frames is getting the miters exactly right. So I'm gonna give you a shortcut to making a really nice picture frame. It's a no miter picture frame. We've got a butt joint here on the corners. Everything is actually held together with pocket screws. I'm gonna take you through the whole process of making one of these starting with ripping our material to size. I'm gonna end up with 2 1/2 inch wide rails and styles. So I'm setting my fence just a little bit over that because we wanna have room to come back and joint the sawn edges so that we have really nice clean edges. Working with cherry and on my cherry, I'm starting with an edge I've already jointed. If that jointing thing is confusion, don't sweat it cause we're gonna talk more about that in just a second. So at this stage of the game, my parts are too long. Ready to rip them to width plus a little bit. All right, now I was talking about jointing. What's the deal with that? Well, the deal with jointing is it's a process that gives us a nice clean edge. We're gonna use that to take the saw marks off. Additionally that makes the edge nice and straight. And that's a really important step in woodworking. We wanna start with straight edges if we wanna produce straight material. So we're gonna do a little transition here. Where this gets us is one of the ways that we can do jointing is right here on a router table. Let's have a look at the cutter that I've got already in the router. This is a flush trim bit and currently unplugged, so we can talk about it some more and get close to it here. A flush trim bit. We've got a cutter exactly the same diameter as the ball bearing here. So the benefit this will give me in just a second is alignment. In order to do jointing on a router table we have to be able to offset the fence. So I'm gonna put shims on the out feed side of my fence. And what that's doing is pushing the fence out just a little bit. And then next step is alignment that I just talked about. What we want is the face of the out feed fence. Even with the ball bearing and just get it close at this point, I'm gonna lock one end, and then I'm going to micro adjust the fence. The way I'm gonna do my micro adjust is by starting too far back. And then bring the fence forward in tiny increments until it looks okay. And then at the end of the day, what's really gonna tell us if we have this right or not, will be our first cut. For our test cut, we had one extra piece. So we'll try that. What we're looking for on that test cut is one of three things. Either it cuts really well like this one just did or as I'm making the cut, maybe it butts into that out feed fence that tells us we're not taking enough material off. Or as I get past the bit it snipes, it kind of falls into the cutter that tells you you're taking too much off. Then you can go on and micro adjust your fence until you get it in just the right spot. This is a great setup where we are. So I'm gonna help myself a little bit here. I added some feather boards to the equation. Cause we want our material to stay snug against the fence. Then we're ready to join our edges. Next step for me I'm gonna cut my parts to finish length. Get the screw pockets in them. Then we can come back and have a look at assembling our no miter picture frame. To put our no miter picture frame together. It's easiest to do this on a bench and further. What we wanna do is securely hold these pieces down. One of the things with screw pockets is that if you don't clamp the parts down to a table while you're putting them together they can climb while you're driving the screw. And we don't want that to happen. The wax paper is here so that if I get squeeze out, it's not going onto my work bench. And once I get some clamp pressure on here, little bit of clamp pressure. I'm feeling across the outside, make sure the long grain and end grain of my parts are aligned. All right, next step. Let that glue dry. Ran an orbit sander over the whole frame so that if you do have any little irregularities the random orbit sander will knock that right out. Then we're gonna come back to the router table again to produce the rabbet that we need on the inside and a nice profile on the outside. Let's talk about that rabbet for a second. When you locate your screw pockets on the back of these frame pieces make sure that you're moving them in enough that you're gonna miss the edge of the rabbet. We're gonna run a router bit inside here. And the last thing we want is for the router bit to hit the screw. I'm running 1/4 inch rabbet. So the screw pocket has to be more than 1/4 inch. That way to make sure we don't run into that screw. That takes care of that. And we're gonna be ready for some routing. Now we're a rabbet hunting here at the router table. What we need to do is get a rabbet in the back of our picture frame to receive the picture. This is gonna be best done in a couple of passes. I'm going, as I said earlier, 1/4 inch wide on the rabbet. I wanna end up 3/8 of an inch deep. So I've controlling the 1/4 inch wide with the ball bearing on the cutter, the depth of the cut we control with the router itself. So pass number one is done. Come up for past number two. Now, when you do this, we're working in space here in the middle of the router table. It's the only way that we can do this kind of rabbeting. Make sure that you're feeding in the correct direction. We wanna go against the rotation of the cutter. So cutting on that side of the cutter as I am I'm feeding this way, this way, this way all the way around. That is looking great. Now let's talk about that rabbet. Currently, it looks like this. We really want it to end up looking like this. Easiest way to do this is just with a hand chisel. After your work is done at the router table, come back with a chisel and you can cut these corners out to square them off so that your glass or plexiglass and picture will drop right in there. I'm gonna do a bit change here and get the fence back on so we can add a profile on the outside of our frame to dress it up a little bit. You can use any cutter you wanna use on the outside of this. I'm using a 1/2 inch round over bit and I'm raising it enough that the shoulder of the cutter is gonna come up into the face of my material. Give it that little detail on the front. So I'm gonna do one more pass. And I wanna talk about sequence of passes here. We wanna cut in this direction first. This direction being we have end grain long grain and end grain. You always wanna route end grain before you do the adjacent laundry. And the reason for that is as we come along this way if we get a little chip over here, that's okay because this cut will take care of it. It'll get rid of it. So that edge first. A little bit of sanding, a little finish. Our frame is in great shape here. Before we end this, let's talk a little bit about math so you can figure out how to dimension this for yourself. Got two pieces here. We've got parts that, butt into other parts. So looking at the inside of this. First thing you're gonna have to do is figure out how big your rabbet's gonna be. We need to know that number. I'm dimensioning this frame for an eight-by-ten image. 1/4 inch rabbet, 1/4 inch rabbet. If this is 10, this piece has to be 9 1/2. Because then we go 1/4 inch more into this piece and 1/4 inch more into this piece. That's fairly straightforward. Now let's look at it this way, same size rabbets. If this is eight inches from here to here then it's seven and a half inside. We're gonna take that number and add it to the width of two frame pieces to get the overall length of this piece. Little bit of math to do in order to calculate your frame. Size part frame, part sizes, but it's not too bad. The other thing I would do then on the frame is in order to hang it on the wall on this one all I did is drill a hole in that top piece. That'll receive a nail. So that can hang up. That takes care of our no miter picture frame table saw work, router table work, work bench, work to put it together. And when we're done, we've got a great looking frame that we didn't have to do any miters on.