Before acquiring a v-nailer, we had a laborious but satisfactory method:
We would pre-align a pair of chop rails in a miter vise, verify a good joint was possible, or what gymnastics or obscenities were required to do so, glue it, let it dry in the vice, then side nail still in the vise, one at the bottom from one direction, and one at the top going in the opposite direction. We used brads with heads, suitable for a small hammer. For really hard wood, like maple, I'd either predrill a hole, carefully, shorter than the brad I intended to nail in, or use a brad the same size as a drill-bit. I'd use heavy wire cutters/sidecutters, cut the head off at a length the 'drill brad' was shorter than the intended nail depth, tighten it in a drill chuck, and carefully predrill a hole maybe 1/4" shorter than the bards I used for side-nailing. This reduced the chance of side-nailing opening up the mitre. Nailing while the glues was still wet was OK on softer woods. Continue with the second half of the frame, then the 3rd corner and last corner.
We'd countersink the small head of finishing brads with a nailset (looks like a punch but has a head shape that is less likely to slip off the brad head, just below the surface of the molding. We just never tried headless pneumatic nailing many people use. You have to figure out the agility and dexterity to not slip with the hammer or nail-set & hit the moulding. We'd mix 'nail hole filler' or putty from either standard colors, or mix custom colors and save the extra (1/4" -6 mm) balls of custom-color nail hold filler in an egg carton (polystyrene foam type) for the next time.
Later, when we had a v-nailer and tall shadow boxes, One v-nail in the bottom and one or two cross-nailed pre-drilled holes at the top of the frame, as described above. Cross-nailing (one in each direction), offset a bit (1/4"-6 mm) so they couldn't hit each other helps prevent a miter severely opening up due to minor mishandling.
Someone told me that hard wood v-nails are slightly duller so they cut across wood grain/growth lines, instead of bending to follow them (leading to 'blowing out' the outside or inside of the miter. Similarly for finishing brads, it was recommended to cut the beveled tip off a brad, then nail it into a pre-drilled side-drilled hole in very hard wood (after the glue dried), to bluntly cut through the grain, and not allow the nail to curve, in following wood grain. Not every trick worked everywhere. Occasionally a frame was a victim, regardless of how careful.
With huge frames (so large that we'd put vises on the floor in a larger area like a gallery, or clamp with band clamps) the frame might be too large to fit the v-nailer or workspace, and only side-nailing was used instead.
We never liked v-nailing frames while the glue was still wet. Plenty of people do, but I tired of wet mitres squirming out of alignment from the top-clamp pressure during wet-v-nailing. Adjustable-side v-nailer fences are supposed to help with that by allowing you to alter the side angle of the fence , but I found them too difficult to adjust, let alone figure out how much to adjust. They must work, but maybe I didn't have the patience to use them.
Murray
