Monuments

Many months ago I got a phone call from a gentleman who wanted to talk about having some boxes made for some photographs he had. His name is David Taylor and he’s a photography professor at the University of Arizona School of Art.

If only it was a simple as that, but it was much more, and much more interesting.

It turns out he had photographed all the border monuments along the US—Mexican border. It is a stunning project. Absolutely stunning. The scope, the beauty of the photographs, what they represent. All of it. It was a privilege to be part of it.

There are, I think, 276 monuments. They needed four boxes and one lid. He was making a wooden box to hold the four boxes, I was making the lid for the set.

But he didn’t want the telltale signs of boxes, especially the paper wrappers most of us use on boxes to increase their strength. For the smaller boxes that wasn’t an issue but for the lid it was a problem. This lid was pretty huge:

Without using paper to support the edges it was a huge problem for a huge box. I tried paper but couldn’t sand away the seam to a degree that I was happy with so it was decided to do without.

To get some stability while covering I tried all kinds of things including getting out my pneumatic brad nailer. But the nails, even the size of brads, expanded the binder’s board and were visible. In the end I used non-permanent tape and augmented it with strategically placed weights. The walls were glued on top of the top of the lid, if that makes sense. It would have been easier to put the walls on the side of the lid but the top wouldn’t have been as clean.

Every time I’ve made them, I’ve been frustrated. It feels like I’m trying to balance pins on their ends, but in the end they come together. I shouldn’t be such a wimp, I know.

The bigger challenge, in some ways, has been to stamp two dies over each other and have them align properly. I never could have done this without the Kensol. But the lids are so much bigger than the table that all normal methods of alignment won’t work. In the end we made up a foam core jig and used that. The dies fit perfectly into each slot in the jig. Kreg clamps hold it in place while we stamp.

The final result:

 

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The photos and the boxes are currently on display at the Phoenix Art Museum. Go see them!

And what’s better is we’ve become friends, and it’s always a nice (and rare) thing when clients make the transition. Nicer, even, than the boxes I think.

years ending in 6 have been good to me... Part I

In the summer of 1986, I uprooted my life and moved to Boston, just for a year. At the time I was a high school social studies teacher and there were no jobs in Western Washington. I decided to take a year off, do something else, and then come back and get back into teaching.

I was hired in an archives. It turned out I really liked the work, so I stayed. I did a variety of things: copied glass plate negatives, rehoused some artifact collections, organized stuff, checked on some historic houses. It was a great job.

A year or two in they asked me to fix books. I was shown a manual on book repair by Jane Greenfield and I followed her directions. I loved the work and hated the result. She taught repairing books to make them structurally sound, but these weren’t beautiful repairs.

The repairs would end up looking like this.

In one sense they were perfectly good repairs. They made books usable again, books that had no value in the covers. Still, I hated doing those repairs. It felt like I was ruining the books unnecessarily. I think that part of my reaction was because the books were bound in leather, which filled me with dread and awe. I should add that the books I worked on were in much better shape than the one shown in this photo.

Looking at that book now, about 28 years after I worked on it, the repair is perfectly fine mechanically and the book throws up the right amount (that’s how much the spine of the book elevates when the book is opened). Greenfield was good and right in what she taught, obviously.

Still, doing work like this kept me awake at night. Seriously, it did.

I felt like this wasn’t really the level of work I wanted to do. But I had no idea what the level I wanted was, or even where it was.

I took at class at the Boston Center for Adult Education on bookbinding, but we made these books. It was, no doubt, a great class for what its intentions were, but my goal was something completely different.

I was disappointed because I wanted to learn to make a “real book.” I hadn’t gotten anywhere.

Next, I bought a bookbinding manual at Buddenbooks on Boylston Street, just across from the Pru. It was Bookbinding, Its Background and Technique by Edith Diehl. Turns out it is THE American bookbinding manual. I set out teach myself.

I’d been pretty good at making stuff in the basement of our house growing up. Learned a lot from my Dad, who could make and fix anything. As an aside his arms were about the size of my legs. One night, coming back from Bellingham, I got pulled over for having a broken tail light. The next day I bought a bulb and set out to remove the lens from the car. It wouldn’t budge. My dad came home and asked what I was doing. When I told him, he said, Let me try. He took the screwdriver and twisted and twisted harder and twisted harder until he broke the screwdriver. He broke the screwdriver. He looked at me, tossed what was left of it in his hand onto the ground, laughed, and went into the house. Try that sometime.

Anyway, Diehl, though probably unable to break a screwdriver, wrote a fantastic book. The first half is a history of binding. The second half is an instruction manual. A great one. But without any context, I got nowhere with it.

At work one day after that class and my self-teaching experiment, I called the Massachusetts Department of Vocational Education and asked where to learn bookbinding. That’s when I first heard about North Bennet Street. It’s a bit of a story as well, but I quit my job, enrolled the next year, and was able to sleep better.

After studying there, I was able to do work like this. And when I knew what good work was, it was a relief and exciting. And led me down a wonderful path that I’m still on. 1986 was a great year.

It's not the heat, it's the humidity

I don’t intend to shock anyone but it’s been pretty hot around here these past few weeks. Including a day of record heat in June:

When we were redoing the barn to turn it into a workshop, one of the decisions was how to cool the space. We decided to spend the money on a mini-split system.

The other option was a unit that mounts in a wall. We have one in the side of the barn that works fantastically well, but it sounds like a plane engine when it’s running. One time when it was on I thought I saw someone in an orange vest waving his arms like he was guiding a plane into its parking slot.

The wall unit is 240 volts and is probably overpowered for the space, but really that just means it cools the space quickly.

I think mini-splits are common in Europe and becoming more of a thing over here. The advantage to them is that there are no air ducts to run through walls or around difficult spaces. They work by having a compressor outside and then two copper lines pass the cooled, or heated, freon (or whatever is used these day) to a unit that’s mounted inside the space.

They are great for older construction because of the small size of the copper lines, which are about 1 inch or so. For that reason they have been very popular in Europe, where they can have much older construction to deal with.

One other big advantage is that they are very quiet, which is good for general sanity but also for teaching. Some units only cool, ours heats as well for those five days a year when we need it.

Do you notice the tape in the photo?  The downside to them is that the mechanics think of them as pretty much disposable, not worth working on. Part of ours has broken. There was the ability to move the air in certain directions but that broke after a few years. But the cooling works just fine so no worries. It’s been installed for about four years now. Maybe five? Whatever, it should have lasted longer than that. I get the sense that some cheap plastic part broke.

But we have been told when it breaks just buy another one, which makes me wonder what it would take to buy a reparable one. Hopefully the compressor is more reliable and when the time comes we’ll just need the inside unit.

Still, it’s been amazing. On the hottest of days it stays in the mid-70s, which frankly is a bit too cool. But the main thing is how quiet it is. Sure it shouldn’t break after only a few years, but perhaps that’s just the world we live in. A less sweaty world than before, and that’s good enough for me.