I love the level of detail put into exploring something so simple. The details are interesting to chew on for a bit.
Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#22Pictures and paintings were supposed to tilt forward a lot, to make viewing them better. It fell out of fashion. Look at old photos from inside homes, and you see wall paintings very tilted.
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#23My strategy was the add a pair of clear stick on bumpers to the back bottom corners of my frame (the kind you stick on cupboard doors so they close softly) to push the bottom out a little bit and straighten them out.
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#24TL;DR - because the wire attachment point is usually to the rear of the center of gravity.
Yes, however the discussion is more valuable than that. I once bought a framed poster at a garage sale and discovered when I got it home that it had a steel plate across the bottom of the frame. I thought it a bit of over engineering for adding frame support (it attached to the back of the frame with machine screws) but when you hung the poster it hung flat against the wall. I took me a couple of weeks to figure out…
> I took me a couple of weeks to figure out the person do did that was moving the CG of the framed print closer to the wall which made hit hang nearly flat on the wall.
As it was at the bottom of the frame, it also moved the CG lower, which also helps to reduce the tilt, even if the CG remains a little bit to the front.
> When reading the referenced article I realized it also allowed for an arbitrarily tightly stretched cross wire because the steel plate would bear all of the stress, not the art.
I don't really get this, if the plate was at the bottom. I assume the stretched wire would be attached somewhere at the top half, so the rest of the frame would need to bear at least some of the stress.
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#25Author discovered value of free body diagrams.
The article seemed like a common sense concept overthought, so I knew there just had to be a well trodden path that someone in the HN comments would bring up by name. Thanks for this!
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#26Because they can't tilt backward?
They clearly can, but the forces tend to pull them the other way.
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#27This sentence is very funny to me: "Most people in the Northern Hemisphere hang their pictures on a wall." I guess OP did some research but perhaps wasn't exhaustive and didn't want to generalise to below the equator. People write funny and quirky things. I'm glad things like archive.org exist to save the quirkiness for future generations.
It is very well known that Down Under the roof is down and the floor is up. Thus, the pictures are not hung to the wall: they are anchored to it!
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#28Pictures and paintings were supposed to tilt forward a lot, to make viewing them better. It fell out of fashion. Look at old photos from inside homes, and you see wall paintings very tilted.
The old houses of the people rich enough to own paintings in the past had much taller ceilings than the houses that are affordable now for most people, while now anyone can have a copy of a famous painting or a cheap original painting or photograph.
So it was normal for the paintings to be hanged at a place higher on the wall, so you had to look somewhat upwards to admire them. In this case, a significant tilt forward was just right to view the painting as orthogonal to the line of view.
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#29My money would (at least partially) be on the guy having bought a duff hanging system, or had it poorly installed.
I've just returned from a holiday where I visited a few art museums.
They all had hanging systems. None of them had frames tilting as excessively as the one in the photo on this guys blog. In fact, the tilt was barely perceptible (if it was there at all).
I'm sure he's making a perfectly valid point in this blog. But I'm just saying it doesn't have to be like that, or at least not so extreme.
Re: Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
#30But is the “undue” stress of a taught wire actually a problem for typical weights?