Large Wall Mirror

[gee-dub]

This mirror is from one of my dad's early offices. It ended up in our dining room back when I was in high school. The 1970 earthquake split our ceiling and knocked this bad boy off the wall. It weighs 50+ pounds and got a surface scratch as it headed past something looking for the floor. The rest of the mirror survived and I have been hauling it from one home to the next for 50-odd years. Finally I will get to make it a new frame. The design will hide the scar. Simply maneuvering the beast at this point in my 70-year-old, 165-pound life is a challenge BUT, I will endeavor to persevere.

I am shooting for a G&G influenced look something like this:

The vertical strips (one of which will hide the scar) are purely decorative as are the leather straps that will make the frame appear to be suspended from the hanging rail. At LOML's request it will echo this frame that I made for a picture my dad took of my mom in 1957.

Back to your regular programming . . . I set the mirror on some rag rugs on top of an MFT-like table that I have on a rolling stand. I place the ever-valuable adjustable height Husky tables under the frame and position them to support the frame without interfering with the mirror.

I pull the frame's retention pins and lower the outer tables.

This worked even better than it did in my head .

The old "turn a clamp into a spreader" trick.

I put the miters at one end under tension.

I give the joint a love tap with a dead blow mallet. and it separates.

I realize I am trying to pull the joint apart perpendicular to the nails so I stop.

I extend my spreader rech with a scrap of ply and push the joint gently apart in the right direction.

Ta-Da!

I will scrap the old frame. It is not historically or sentimentally significant, is made of soft wood and is painted flat green. This was a Spanish influenced style that my parents favored back in the 70s. Not so much for me.

[gee-dub]

The original frame is 1-3/8" thick but is heavily molded.

I get to one of my favorite parts of any project; material selection. I try to use up any shorts or off cuts I can.

Then while crawling through the racks I found this nice sized piece of lumber. Score!!!

I should be able to get the whole frame out of this board. While it doesn't help me use up leftovers it does solve any color matching issues I might have had.

It's a fair trade.

[wtnhighlander]

@gee-dub, since you brought up the issue of moving heavy stuff as we age, let me ask about lumber storage. How do you manage to get heavy planks down from ladder heights on a wall-mounted horizontal rack??

I ask, because LOML would prefer I move my stash out of the garage, where I have a conveniently high ceiling, and can stand boards on end for easy access at floor level. Anywhere else I go will need horizontal storage like yours.

[Chet]

I made the "age" decision about a year ago.  I figured the ladder/horizontal storage combo would come and have a discussion with me sooner or later.  The space in my shop where I could make vertical storage work had less then 8 ft head space so I just have to make strategic cuts to make lengths that will fit on the rack.

[gee-dub]

As I use boards and bring them to a length under 10 feet I move them to the vertical storage area.  This pic is from 4 years ago and the vertical storage area is about twice this wide now as longer material gets cut down.  I would strongly recommend keeping your vertical storage area . To answer your question, I position the straight ladder, pull the board forward and slide it down the ladder as I back down.  I am working to get away from this.

I probably should have mentioned that the top of the frame and the hang rail are made to match the back rail of the sideboard that the mirror will hang over.

I am concerned about the weight and am re-thinking my design. I want it to be visually the same but probably have a sub-frame that connects to the mirror and a thinner visible frame that attaches to that. The mirror is already attached to a backer which is what is actually hung on the wall. The original frame was just attached to the mirror/backer assembly and was made from a light weight soft wood.

I'll detail this out later once I figure out how I'm going to do it. There will be an unavoidable gap between the mirror and the wall but I would like to minimize it. I may epoxy a french cleat to the backer board. I see a few cups of coffee and a lot of staring into space in my future shop time today

[gee-dub]

OK, I think I have it figured out (in record time for me).

The mirror/backer assembly and hardware require about 11/16" of depth to clear the wall. I scaled the visible frame material back from about 1-1/8" to 5/8" so there is a substantial reduction in weight there. I am still leaning towards a French cleat versus the "picture framing wire" hanging method. I used a large multi-stud spanning cleat for the master bedroom headboard and it has proven rock solid.

I think there is a possibility of using a similar mounting method for this beast.

[wtnhighlander]

More power to the french cleat! 

As an alternative, you might consider a dovetail groove integrated into the frame itself, and hung over flat head screws, like I did on this mirror project:

Its been hanging strong for nearly 5 years, so I guess it works.

[legenddc]

The title of your thread is dramatically underselling what you're making here. I expected to see a basic rectangular picture frame with a mirror in it, not this crazy design. Really looking forward to seeing how this turns out. It looks like it will match your other furniture very well!

[gee-dub]

I finally decided on attaching a french cleat via epoxy.

since this will essentially laminate the two materials together I want to be sure the mirror is flat. Otherwise you will pick up distortion as the mirror is somewhat flexible despite being 1/4" thick.

The nearly 60 year old tempered hardboard gets the surface resin abraded as per the epoxy manufacturer's recommendation.

The longer piece is the mirror part of the cleat. The little rectangles are just resting blocks to make everything come into plane. The shorter piece of the cleat will be attached with washer-head screws to three studs. The shorter wall portion of the cleat will allow for some side-to-side positioning once hung.

While selecting material I came across this bit of figure. I couldn't resist placing it at the center of the top rail of the mirror frame.





Ever onward 

[gee-dub]

Milling is milling . . . when you know the "about" dimensions of the blank you require it can speed things along if you get your blank to that approximate dimension before milling. If there is an extra 6" of crooked stock I will have to deal with that only to cut it off anyway; if ya git mah drift.



I am not one to mill a 2" blank down to a 1-1/4" blank in the form of saw dust. This stuff costs money, right? If I am going to remove more than about 1/8" I resaw first and save the stock for box parts or veneers.

I have spouted off about this before. I noticed that I did not even bother to adjust the height of my guides. If your saw is well aligned you rarely even need the guides. Certainly if you are forcing your blade to stay on track you may want to take a Saturday morning and tune things up .

At any rate I end up with some good box or box insert stock.

And here are my sub-frame milled blanks ready to move forward.

I'm gonna grab a cup of coffee.

[Von]

With regards to the guides on the bandsaw, to each their own of course, but I set mine not to guide the blade but to reduced the amount of exposed blade I might accidentally run into.

[Mark J]

18 hours ago, gee-dub said:

I noticed that I did not even bother to adjust the height of my guides.

Was that a onetime thing, or do you usually keep the upper guide all the way up?

[gee-dub]

On 4/6/2026 at 5:31 AM, Mark J said:

Was that a onetime thing, or do you usually keep the upper guide all the way up?

If I'm not doing curves I generally don't worry about them.  Obviously the thrust bearing position is important so you don't ruin the set of the teeth.  It is just that if I have been doing tall resawing and later do shorter ones I just don't really think about it 

[gee-dub]

On 4/6/2026 at 5:27 AM, Von said:

With regards to the guides on the bandsaw, to each their own of course, but I set mine not to guide the blade but to reduced the amount of exposed blade I might accidentally run into.

So true and thank you Von.  I am a bit of a safety nut and your point is 100% valid.  I need to reset my "getting jaded" meter .  Getting too comfortable around these man-eaters is what often leads to bad things.

[gee-dub]

So the sub-frame parts are mostly done. Final length will be determined by the mirror.

I rip my selected top-of-frame and hanger-bar parts at the bandsaw . . . with the guides and more importantly the guards down.  Thanks again to Von for the wake up call.

The adjustable tables come into play again. My jointer tables are long for a little 8" but, not long enough to keep these 65" blanks in plane.

The bow in these blank is obvious. Fortunately I have plenty of thickness to get what I am after.

Once a face and an edge are milled true I can rip to width.

A couple of runs through the planer and we're all happy.

Time for some coffee.

[Coop]

@gee-dub, how deep is your out feed table? 

[gee-dub]

On 4/6/2026 at 7:27 PM, Coop said:

@gee-dub, how deep is your out feed table? 

It is an 8" jointer and the tables match that.  Outfeed length is 31" and infeed is 43-1/2".  It is a parallelogram jointer so the overall length varies slightly with depth of cut but I believe it is sold as an overall of 76".  The machine proves to be well sized for 90-odd percent of what I do.  Every now and then a project with longer or wider parts comes along.  That's when the extension tables (length) or my planer sled (width) come into play. I used to use roller stands for length extension but the tables are much nicer.  The additional length support keeps this . . . 

. . . from happening.

[gee-dub]

I use a 1/4" blade to cut close to the line for these parts.

The frame and hanger rail will echo the sideboard top so I use the same template from that project in a slightly different position.

Always route downhill when you can.

The hour I spent making this template routing jig/sled (???) has paid dividends for years. The auto-adjust clamps make swapping parts and template a breeze.

I sometimes forget to carry my layout lines across faces. A saddle square takes care of this with ease. You don't need a formal one. A piece of angle aluminum or even a well made barrel hinge will do.

It allows me to carry over the forgotten line to the opposite face.

At any rate I end up with a couple of template routed parts that match up pretty well.

[fcschoenthal]

I think @Coop meant your tablesaw outfeed. My guess is that it's about 4'x3'.

[gee-dub]

Good guess.  It is 48" x 34".  The dog hole and clamp slot pattern is stolen from a Woodsmith or Shop Notes mag back in the day.  It has worked out really great. The bit of extra depth allows the top to bridge over the 6" duct work running to the tablesaw and router table.

 

[Coop]

On 4/7/2026 at 2:30 PM, fcschoenthal said:

I think @Coop meant your tablesaw outfeed. My guess is that it's about 4'x3'.

Correct and thanks. I currently have a Husky adjustable height table in another part of my I shop and I think at the price, this might be best for the out feed and customize it with drawers as @gee-dub’s. Sorry for the hj. 

[gee-dub]

I sometimes tend to go overboard on the layout work. A set of French Curves are cheap online and come in handy often.

I play around a bit and get something I am happy with. I figured there were only two ends so I would just band saw them and spoke shave them to final.

My OCD kicked in and I decided to template them. Who knows I may use the template on something else later . . . it's happened before. I have mentioned before how I keep an old "face cream" jar of shellac around with a rag in it. It is marked as "dirty" and gets used for jigs, templates, and so forth.

I will template route the end profiles and shave the long arc that connects them.



Ever onward . . .

[Mark J]

I use French curves, too.  Having found a section of one of the curves with the desired curvature I wish I could find a way to mark the beginning and end points of the segment for later use.  

[gee-dub]

On 4/9/2026 at 5:58 AM, Mark J said:

I use French curves, too.  Having found a section of one of the curves with the desired curvature I wish I could find a way to mark the beginning and end points of the segment for later use.  

I stick piece of Scotch tape on and mark them with a fine point felt pen. Definitely an extra step but when trying to match multiples . . . worth it.

[fcschoenthal]

On 4/9/2026 at 7:58 AM, Mark J said:

I wish I could find a way to mark the beginning and end points of the segment for later use.  

Mine are plastic. I just use a sharpie to mark the segment. It doesn't rub of too easily (although you have to be somewhat careful) and will clean up with IPA nicely. The tape would definitely work and would probably be less steps and cleaner.

Now if I could only remember that the next time I use them.