try swienty.
http://www.swienty.com/uk/home.asp
or Thomas
http://www.thomas-apiculture-shop.com
or lysons
or holtermans.
http://www.holtermann-shop.de/index.php/cPath/1
it all depends on quantities and where you go and what you want,
if like me you can drive for 12 hours non stop for a laugh with good company then shopping anywhere in Europe is dead easy or just pay the deliver costs
i used to go to France on the early morning ferry, then straight into Calais for croissants. lovely warm ones, thousands of lovely warm croissants covered in jam, sorry tripped out there!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
any way Thomas is two hours away from Calais and lysons can be done in 6, ten if you go all the way to Poland.
the biggest batches i every brought was when i was working in Poland, we asked lysons to supply a British sized frame which at the time they did not carry as stock, we ordered three thousand and paid about £600 in 1994 i also went to Denmark and paid about £500 for 2,500 frames from someone who ran a timber yard we knew from work.
with wood the nearer you get to the source the cheaper they are, look toward the Scandinavian country's, Norway and Finland and Sweden, Russia, as well as Poland and Belarus etc, timber and labour is cheaper in some of these but not all country's
we would consider a long weekend to go to Europe for a big shop, say a grand in cash and a car and caravan or a plain old transit van if you want, we would buy frames and poly hives at around £50 a set we would then sell these for about £100 for a poly hive of base, brood, three supers,roof,feeder, cheap as chips we would also buy wax in at about £3 a kilo frames at about P each,
a German motorized extractor is about £260
selling prices were about
extractor £400, £140 profit
poly hives £120, £70 profit
frames seven for a fiver for 12 by 14 profit was about £3.50
wax a kilo on ebay £16 profit £13 thats better than selling smack!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
we reckoned we could get a family weekend away for free when we did a big shop and two weeks later get your grand back again.
the best trip ever was when a friend i used to work and drive with into europe maded a massive muck and sold by accident a 1,000 kilo order of wax sheets to a candle shop in london for £12 per kilo, i had none so we drove to poland to a beekeeper that used to make his own sheets at the time brough a ton off him at £5 a kilo drove back to london and dropped the sheets off on monday morning a round trip of 36 hours driving in total and a profit of £7,000 minus hire of van and overdraft etc about £2,800 in cold hard cash, three months later in the winter of 2007 the world markets dropped and the great recession started and all the london townies could not afford to make they hand wrapped candles any more so the market for wax bottomed out totaly
all of which was declared of course through the tax and vat man
any way back to frames, once you have the tools and the little jigs made up making them is just a simple case of pushing a piece of wood past a blade without chopping off a finger or three, the jigs will take the time to build and rebuild and rebuild until you get it right and from then on its quite easy to do. where i went wrong has to be very easily the timber i used, we have two sorts of pallet timber one is very very soft wood made from the toilet tissue tree, then second sort is the one ones made from some form of harder wood this is the ones i used, the reusing of soft woods from site was also tried, the problem with that is we don't get joinery grade just bog standard so i used to have waste well over 50% sometimes to find a foot long straight section.
now unlike me if you have available a cheap supply either shop brought or yard brought or skip supplied then your away and running as someone above mentioned we don't count our own time and to some nibbling wood is fun and a hobby then i would definitely go for it and do it
the biggest tip by far is when making you jigs and the base that they sit on , NEVER USE YOUR ADJUSTABLE FENCE GUIDE as it has to be reset every single time you wanted to use it, i covered the top of my bench saw with a sheet of 18MM mdf and had battons on the sides so it just sat there every time and the mdf had runners screwed and glued to it to make each guide slide on them, you have one base to make each type of frame or part,
)
