Crescent Select Garbage Mats

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quaintcorners

Grumbler in Training
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Apr 5, 2005
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Canada
Anybody out there using the new Crescent Select mats. Everybody tired of trying to cut around the multiple bits of charcoal ash imbedded in the top layer. I have discussed this directly with Crescent and they treated me like I was from outer space. I am at my last straw today as I had to waste my time and money yet one more time to get my order out the door. Imagine if I had the same attitude toward my customers. Officially today - my crescent select samples are firestarter. I refuse to give them one more cent!. It would appear that boycotting the product will make them wake up and at least make an attempt to resolve the problem.
 
Wow, quaintcorners...welcome to the Grumble ...you really came in grumbling strong!!! I can tell you are :fire: and rightfully so.

I too get tired of flaws in boards and wish I was better at catching them prior to my last inspection of the finished mats.

I can't honestly say if there are more in Crescent than Bainbridge. After your post I'll keep better track of who seems to have more but agree that Crescent should be more resceptive to your input.

Hope you have fun here!

Dave Makielski
 
How long has this been going on?

:shrug: We use Crescent Select mats, as well as Bainbridge ArtCare mats and Crescent RagMats. We probably use more Crescent Selects than anything else, and I do not recall that they have any more flaws than other matboard types.

Every matboard type comes up with an occasional flaw, which is why we can buy "flawboard" from our suppliers, for non-matting purposes. Flawboard makes great matcutting slipsheets and filler boards.

How long has this been going on for you? If it is a short-term problem, ask for replacement mats and move on. If it is a long term problem, why aren't the rest of us aware of it?

Is anyone else experiencing more flaws than usual in any certain type of matboard?
 
crescent select mats

Hi Jim. I had this issue initially with the whitecore paper mats that I have used on art card framing. I quit using them. I have had problems with crescent select since inception. It shows up most on white mats. It appears that there is a mark on the mat. Then you find it won't erase and once I started to poke at it with blade, I find a piece of black substance which crescent confirmed was ash. By then you have a whole in the mat and it goes in the garbage. My crescent mat supplier is located 500 miles from me. It is not a simple solution, except to quit using it. I was most irate with a suede mat that was imbedded with ash. I had no substitute. At $40 per mat, you shouldn't have to spend an hour surveying it with a magnifying glass. So again - I declare - its garbage.
 
We use mostly Bainbridge. For the most part we only have the occasional flaw in the whites( the little gray spot that gets darker and darker the more you try to remove it). One of our artist sends his work in matted. He uses Cresent 8 ply white and there seem to be more flaws in his mats than others. Don't know where he gets them but have brought it to his attention several times and make him replace. Other than that not much complaints oh except for that boot print in the middle of B8463.
 
I've had that problem with Crescent mats, too. I thought it was carbon. Anyway, I try to pretend it's not there. Then I try to convince myself that the customer will never see it. Then when that doesn't work, I pick at it. Then I reorder and recut the mat I screwed up. Hope someone at Crescent is listening/reading...:smileyshot22:
 
I like Artique too. They have more vibrant colors and great pastel shades, but their selection is somewhat limited. The quality of the boards is excellent and I've yet to find any flaws in Artique

I have full line Crescent, Bainbridge and Artique ...too many offerings, I know. There is some that are nearly exact between Crescent and Bainbridge and I ought to eliminate the near duplicates.

I do tend to lean toward Bainbridge being of better quality than Crescent, but hark back to the days when we purchased an average of nearly 5000 sheets of Crescent a month ...mostly illustration and poster board. We had a close association with them ...good folks. Freight was too costly from Bainbridge on the east coast until they matched freight costs from Wheeling to us.

Dave Makielski
 
Flaws

Yeah, those little black things are a pain....didn't know it was ash though. Did they say how ash is getting into the paper? Seems like they could eliminate that problem.

I've also had problems with little black hair-like things in Crescent's lighter-colored suedes. The only way I've been able to get them out is with tweezers. If you rub them they just get worse.
 
Crescent like all other mat board manufacturers, do not actually produce the top paper sheet, inner core, nor backing paper. They are converters. They take the individual components and make the board from the parts. Its just like custom framing. In fact many of the suppliers for the individual mat board manufactors are shared by one another (individually purchased).
 
Boy, I learned the hard way not to mess with any slight flaw if a light eraser job does not do the trick, too many times having to toss the matt. I know we notice flaws more than customers and now I don't worry about them if they are not semi-glaring; not easy for a perfectionist, but I'm working on it.
 
Quaintcorners,

Welcome to the Grumble.

Its' frustrating alll right. Seems every once and awhile I come across one and realize it's time to cut another mat and hope this one looks better. It would drive me nuts to seal up a package with a noticable flaw in the board, and picking at it only makes it worse, so don't...
 
Look guys - you're all just underestimating the scope of the Flumb Pervert.

This guy doesn't just sneak up behind YOU - undo your done-up thing, throw a few foriegn bodies in, do it all back up again and then run off sniggering, he does it to matboard suppliers too, and glass suppliers.

He's working on artists and print publishers now!

He spent some time in my drymount press, but I excorcised the bugger!
 
I've called Crescent a couple of times & they've been very responsive for me., follow up return calls and very helpful. Who did you talk to? Maybe I could find the name of the person I talked to. It must have been the tech dept? as I called once about the paper surface of a particular color board & once about their sized rag mats. Both times was very satisfied in thier handling of the matter.
 
We refer to the spots that grow as we pick at them as "icebergs" (you know, more underneath the surface than on top). Oh, and here's a dandy secret! Rembrandt black soft pastel is the exact shade of black that is on suede board. I can cover up darn near anything on black suede nowadays.
 
EllenAtHowards said:
... Oh, and here's a dandy secret! Rembrandt black soft pastel is the exact shade of black that is on suede board. I can cover up darn near anything on black suede nowadays.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip, Ellen. I never thought of using pastels on suede, but use them to take care of all kinds of "problems" on other mat board and to touch up scratches on prints, etc.!

But the real question that comes to mind is do you put a resevoir in the frame package to catch the fallout from the mat? ;)

Dave Makielski
 
I do like Crescent products, as well as Bainbridge. It can be a challenge when you run into a bugger in the mat, and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it. If it can be fixed, ok. If not you cut a new one and move on. The mat board construction is out side of my circle of influence, and after a polite phone call to the manufacturer and supplier I survey the situation and plot a new course.
It's the challenge of creativity that makes this fun...
 
I recently had an order using 6 bainbridge white vellum mats and those buggers were everywhere. Over the last year, I've been having a lot more problems with the black specks. But then, I started wearing reading glasses about a year ago. Now it takes me a lot longer to clean the glass and mats.
I think I'll ditch the glasses so I can get more framing done.
 
yeah, icebergs, thats a good description! i find that there are far more of these contaminants in crescent boards, than in bainbridge. its most often in cotton solids than alpha boards. i can frequently do a "seal team 5 extraction" of the "chunk" and mend the crater if its a solid rag: lil pick---lil scrape---lil sand---lil pick---lil lil scrape---lil sand---lil bone----etc :)
 
I use a 20X loupe and an exacto knife. When the "iceberg" is magnified, you can get the point of the exacto knife under it and flick it off without damage.......usually.

And yes, we have more trouble with the Crescents than the Bainbridge or Artiques.
 
Couldn't find the name, that was from back in the spring & summer. I'm pretty sure I just called the 800 # & got connected to the tech dept. They were very interested in feedback. I've only been useing the Selects for a couple months so haven't noticed the problem yet. But again, my experience with Crecsents customer service has been nothing but great leaving me to wonder who you talked to? We even get visits from a "custom frame support specialist" (that's what it says on her card) at least a couple times a year. In the meantime here's my method of filling tose pits. Scrape a little fluff off the surface of a scrap of the board. Mix it with a tiny bit of methyl cellulose paste. Fill the pit, cover with a piece of kraft paper & gently iron/dry with a tacking iron.
 
Flumbs

We use Crescent, Bainbridge and Artique equally and I can't say any of the companies are all that different when it comes to the "icebergs" as Ellen appropriately called them. The only one that has been giving me fits lately is my favorite Artique 4977 digital white that I use by the case for one of our photographers. Not only have I been working around the "flumbs", but the top of the product has been lifting off. My rep has graciously offered to replace the boards, but I don't like the initial aggrevation.

Lori
 
Thank Heavens

:D

For some time I have been whingeing about this problem to every supplier of every matboard and geting the same reply from all of them:

You know, the hurt then puzzled look and the flat statement that "nobody else has ever had any trouble with that product..........:" shrug:

My solution, several years ago was to take all the smooth white and pale samples out of all my corner sets and junk them. My customers have learnt to use textured whites or flannel finishes. A bit drastic, I know, but at least with a texture or flannel you have a dog's chance of dealing with these bits of black junk.

The watershed moment which brought this on this came over one job. I framed 24 large pencil sketches, each involving near enough a full sheet of Crescent's antique white. Eight of those #### matts had to be recut because of embedded bits of crud. This was one of my best customers who was paying me a heap of money for a first-class job and I was damned if I was going to give him any "near-enough" work.

Even after I showed my local Crescent rep the wreckage I still got the old denial routine:mad: :mad:
 
OK. All of us have experienced some flaws in matboard, but some of the reactions in this thread seem extreme. A few thoughts at this point:

1. The problem is universal -- every matboard type and brand occasionally has a flawed board. This issue is not unique to Crescent Select, as implied by the original post.

2. It is unreasonable to expect a paper product to be consistently flawless, just as it would be unreasonable to expect a length of moulding to have no warps or knots. Flawless matboards have never been available, and never will be.

3. A matboard flaw should rarely cause us inconvenience or added cost. Rather than inspecting after we cut, why not look closely at the whole board before we cut it? That way we could almost eliminate the risk of wasting our time to cut it again.

4. It may be tempting to throw away flawed mats we have cut, but if we require our suppliers to replace flawed boards, they may be inspired to more carefully inspect them, and keep even more flawed boards out of our supply chain.

5. I've only been framing for 19 years, but in my limited experience, a flawed matboard is rare. I have not kept track because it's no big deal, but my guess is probably less than 2 out of 100 boards have surface-visible flaws. And some of those are fixable. If we cut 25 double mats per week, a defect rate of 2% would affect about one board every two weeks. For me, it seems more like one per month.

6. If your incidence of matboard flaws is more than 2%, perhaps the problem is damage from handling, or damage in the shop, not flaws in the board. Is it possible that the flaws are created in your handling & cutting? For example, it takes only a spot of pencil lead, embedded in the surface, to make a permanent mark that could look like a flaw. Also, a tiny bit of 'sawdust' from cutting aluminum moulding, or a flake of some moulding's gesso finish, could become embedded by the matcutter's clamping bar, which exerts considerable pressure.
 
i'm with Jim on this one

I checked with theframers before I posted and it's once in a great while when we need a replacement board. Sure, it's aggravating, but it is so rare for us anyway

We love the "marbelized" series and textured (9700 series)

Maybe we just really lucky
 
I am very surprised by the postings here. I use Crescent exclusively here in Germany. I find that there is a much wider selection in the suede mat line than in Artique and I have never seen any ash on any mat. Thanks for the heads-up, will have to pay particular attention to this when I get back to the states.

Sherry
 
First, I haven't been framing for about a year, but that being said, I found flaws in matboard almost every day. Not just once every two to three weeks. I used Crescent Rag mats, and Bainbridhge's Alphamats. I even tried the Artiques, and Crescent Select. All mats had problems, and I found that they would get bad shipments.

The thing is to catch the problem early, let your distributor know as soon as posible, and hope that they can repace the product in their warehouse.

You can't point a finger at one type of mat, or just one company... but you can point a finger at a distributor that continues to knowingly send out inferior product.

Then you must be prepared for the fact that it will take them a while to recieve a new shipment. Hopefully the manufactorer will have been informend of the flaw, and tried to fix the problem.

Point in case... I had one mat number that the top sheet kept coming off the mat. Yes, I mean one color of one brand. The rest of the brand worked fine. So, I kept sending it back, and they kept sending me replacment mats... from the same batch. I finally told them to stop sending me defective matboard, and they took the hint and checked their supply. ALL of that particular mat had been made wrong. They sent back ALL that they had in stock, and it took six weeks for them to replace it. (They sent me a box of chocolates for being patient and waiting.) But I finally got my matboard, and finished my customer's piece.

Customer was happy, (I shared the chocolate with them) and I was happy.
 
I don't think one supplier is better than another on this. I have had days were I could have issues with both. Tend to have few and far between. Hey this happens every so often. I think warped or twisted wood is more common. But you deal with it. It is part of this business.

If I have something, I get a loop and an exacto. I can usually pull out the junk with sharp tweezers. Then instead of sanding a whole I fill the whole in with water from a siringe. I inject small amounts into the whole. Let it dry and it will raise the grain just like wood. Then after it has had sometime to dry go back and sand with fine sand paper. Works on regular stuff, not suede of course.
pl
 
Has Select been reformulated? I find they cut with greater difficulty, bringing to mind the old paper blackcores. I'm using a #900SE, the same blade for years, and it's dragging terribly on the Selects, but not on any other board.
 
I think summed it up for me.

I have found small problems in all the different companies.

I use a bunch of Crescent and overall have been happy with their product, Bainbridge is good also and the only reason I limit my Artique sampling is that you can only get it through Larson, the others I get from just about all my vendors.

Bob
 
JFeig said:
Crescent like all other mat board manufacturers, do not actually produce the top paper sheet, inner core, nor backing paper. They are converters. They take the individual components and make the board from the parts. Its just like custom framing. In fact many of the suppliers for the individual mat board manufactors are shared by one another (individually purchased).
Click to expand...

Hi Jerome,

That is almost true. Only Artique is made lock, stock and barrel by one manufacturer.

HTH
 
lemons to lemonade???

Now, if only Crescent could get those boogers consistently placed all over the whole board and we could sell them as 'recycled.'

I can count on one hand how many problems I have had with mat board icebergs in the past five years. Goddess luck, I guess.

edie the boogerfree goddess:shrug:
 
Quaintcorners, welcome to The Grumble. A few years back I got my dander all up at Bainbridge mats. I vented my anger on this same forum, The Grumble. I thought, boy, Bainbridge, your in BIG trouble now. I just knew my called for boycott would have them groveling for our business and taking care of whatever my problem was. You can well imagine the consternation on my face when they did absolutely nothing, and they continue to this day doing the same thing.

Then, to top it all off and to add insult to my injury, they remain in business. Every morning, I wake up shaking my head in wonder at the power of big business. These mat board companies just have so darn much business that they could honestly care less about a few petty concerns from those of us here on The Grumble.

The one good thing about this forum is, at least it does give you a place to publicly damm them all to hel l. Before The Grumble, there was no such place. Anything troubling you with a supplier had to be taken directly up with them. They would always carefully explain to you that you are the first they have ever heard about having whatever problem your having with them. All you could do after one of those conversations was to hang up the phone and start doing gorilla stomps on their samples.

John
 
I have seen the flaws in the white line. Having a background in the paper manufacturing industry, dad spent 42 years in it, he says it is very near impossible to make 'pure' white cardboard material. The process is such that it lends its self to issues, however, implementing a good qc program prevents the 'escapes' of those baddies. The charcoal or ash spots comes from the process used to make the paper acid free or buffered which ever you prefer. I have sent mat board back to my supplier on a couple of occasions much to their chagrine!!!
 
Try to reason it this way, fellow perfectionists...

The customer is looking at the artwork, not the mat. OK, you WILL get the occasional person (who is probably a frustrated framer!) who can spot a dot from forty paces, but 99 44/100 of them won't see a thing.

Our rule of thumb is: If there are 5 or more of the same thing, then it is the way the it is supposed to look... called around here "part of the charm"
 
If you take a few seconds and scan the board before you cut you can cut around 80% of your problems. Open your eyes or get reading glasses if that would help.

framer
 
Jim Miller said:
OK. All of us have experienced some flaws in matboard,...

...but my guess is probably less than 2 out of 100 boards have surface-visible flaws. And some of those are fixable. If we cut 25 double mats per week, a defect rate of 2% would affect about one board every two weeks. For me, it seems more like one per month.
Click to expand...

If indeed the defect rate is only 2%, why on earth, then don't the manufacturers install some quality control and take out that 2% instead of sending it out to framers to be their quality control???

How many times does that 'iceberg' occur in the very last piece of the mat of that colour, that is for a job that has to be finished today!
 
hate it when you are doing that 32X40 on the evening AFTER your weekly deliviery----cut 3-4 hol;es and the one in the middle has that chunk of crud in the bevel---just 1/8 either way and it wouldnt show!!!!!!!!:fire:

also hate it that I go over the suede "carefully", mark it, cut it, turn it over to buff out the scuff marks and there are these little round/bare spot(s) that will only be coverup-able on black/dark blue(these look just like bubbles were on the surface as they applied the flocking and their QC & mine just missed them:cry: now we can throw this one away and reorder for next weeks delivery!)

I have gotten this sort of thing from C, B, & A---no one is exempt! I notice/remember it more from C as I sell more of that---wider color choices!
 
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