Great suggestions everyone, in the nick of time for me. I have a few additional questions:

Can one request the help of a spouse and still remain married after completing the stretching ordeal?

I need to ship said stretched 6'x4' canvas overseas. What is the best way to do this? Remove, ship and restretch?? after all that? OR...Crate??

help.

Stanka,

If I vere to trust anyone to do the job of restretching such a finished painting I would search for a person from an art supply shop. Many shops have a person that handle stretching of new canvasses for sale in the shop. Maybe your client could persuade such one to do the job. Or a framer.

Allan

Thanks, Linda. Yes, I guess that care and moderation are what counts in gluing-after-the-fact. Like you, I am fussy about placement, and I have taken table-saw-to-panel quite a few times,well after a painting is finished and varnished, and am about to again. In this recent case, I have, in fact, removed the varnish but that is because I am repainting a bunch of stuff, but that's another story.

Juan

Stanka, most people I know that have stretched canvases of that size would roll them for shipping, and have a trusted person on the other end, re-stretch them. It is much less expensive to ship, and I assume that is the main reason to do it.

Linda and Garth may recall that Paul Newton had his award winning painting at the PSA conference rolled up to ship from Australia. He rolled it back up and took it on the plane home, too. It was a commission, so it was indeed something that he needed to be careful about. I'm sure it was done on commercially pre-primed acrylic gessoed canvas. Anyway, it wasn't too old.

Oh, yes, Linda, as far as "what is too old" goes, I don't really know. But, I imagine you can get away with a lot, depending on the thickness of paint and on the particular ground. I have a couple of paintings from when I was 12 years old that are rolled up and, when unrolled periodically, do not show any cracks whatsoever. They were done on canvas paper (whatever that is). On the other hand, I have 6 year old pre-primed canvas from Rigacci's in Florence, Italy, on a wide roll that is all cracked and fissured. It is useless. Paintings done on it are very crack prone already. The priming is some sort of glue-chalk concoction, and no matter what the claims of flexibility are by the manufacturer, it isn't.

Juan

Thank you Allan and Juan.

I suspected rolling would be the most feasible option. Its always so tricky when you're dealing with commissions. I like to at least act like I know what I'm doing ;)

Regards,
Stanka

A picture guide to canvas stretching
 

To all,

I have added a picture tutorial here in another thread .

I hope it proves useful. It relates to the initial post of this thread with the written instructions.

Garth

Or you guys can just use stainless steel staples and call it a day!!!
Richard Schmid uses cheep staples and varnishes them so they don't rust...

Beats cracking your fingers under a tack hammer!

I'll second Tony on the stainless steel staples. Regular staples rust.
The staple gun is a wonderful invention! I can handle the canvas stretcher tool and the stapler, and do the whole thing myself (but not six foot canvases!).

I would assume that one purpose of the copper tacks is to look pretty for the client?

My husband and I stretch my canvases together. One of the problems we had using a staple gun (electric) was the varying hardness of the stretchers. Sometimes the wood was so hard the staple would not go in all the way or it would be too soft and the staple would go too far and cut the canvas. We couldn't tell what to expect, even on the same stretcher bar, because sometimes the wood is pieced. So we switched to tacks and it works much better.