 Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. Welcome you back. And I just wanted to show a few slides about using the website. Remember, if you need to reset your password, this is the e-mail address. If you have questions and you want to contact me directly, not through the discussion, you can use my e-mail address, and I will answer you. When you're looking at a live event, this is what you'll see. When I posted the webinar, this is what you'll see. So last time I posted it about a couple of hours afterwards. So there's that thing about the webinar. And then remember that I don't care when you see the webinar, whether you see it live or whether you see the recording, but you do need to see them all. And then underneath there are assignments. So there's assignment for week one, which I posted right after the webinar, and there was the quiz. And both of these are past fail. The quiz you can answer many times. And it's just to go over the points of what we did, and I will post those right after the live webinar. And then finally, there are handouts, and you can find them under the handout thing. So these are the handouts for last week. The handouts for this week are 2.1, and they're at the bottom of this list. And if you have any questions, there's the fact. So you can look there. It should answer most of your questions, but if not, send me an email. And that's all I have to say. We'll turn it over to Mark Wemling from PACKIN. He's our course coordinator. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Susan. And welcome, everybody. Our speaker today is Jim Williams. He is the exhibit designer and preparator for the Kent State University Museum. The museum focuses on collecting and preserving historic and contemporary costumes, textiles, and fashion design. Jim has been working in exhibition production for over 30 years at a variety of institutions, and also served as the lead technician and project manager for regional conservation labs. Outside the museum, Jim designs and creates a studio furniture on its own. So I'd like to thank Jim for joining us today, and we look forward to your presentation. Okay. Well, thank you, Mark. And welcome, everybody. Good afternoon or morning if it's still morning where you are. We are going to take a look at furniture and fixtures for small museums. So a little bit about how to build some casework and platforms and the like. So I can get my slides to start clicking forward here one second. Okay. So click overview. Mark just kind of told you a little bit about me. I've been doing this for quite a while, and all the institutions that I've been involved with, we built all of our casework in-house. So what we're going to discuss first is object safety and preventive conservation, which is why we do casework in the first place. We'll touch a little bit on what kind of materials we want to use and how to protect your objects from the materials themselves. Then we're going to go into a brief discussion about setting up your own shop if you don't have one already. This will cover all the tools and basic techniques. And then we'll go into a very basic pedestal design, a couple of different ideas for that, some wall cases and ideas for how you can build those. Platforms, which as you can see in the photograph, I tend to use a lot because of what my museum collects. And then we'll take some questions and hopefully I will provide some answers for you about what you can do in your own place. So to start with, first order of business, why do we build casework? Well, we build casework to protect things. We need to protect them from our audience. Everybody knows that people will want to reach out and touch what you put on display. We need to create a barrier to things that are in the environment itself, dust, fumes, cleaners, all that kind of stuff. We can use casework to help mitigate climate changes. If you're a historic house or you just have a wacky HVAC system, sometimes you need to control that at a microclimate level. We will look at the materials that you build to casework, how to keep that from harming things. And we have to consider that when we're designing. As you design your casework, you really have to consider how the objects are going to be put into them, how they're going to be taken out, and try to minimize any risks that might occur during the actual installation or de-installation. And we all want to use our casework to maximize the visitor's experience. So we want to provide the best access to viewing but the best protection for the object, keeping in mind that not all of our visitors will have the same mobility or acuity. So we have to think about that in the casework, too. So in our perfect world, the environment is made up of things that are inert and safe, but not always the case. So our goal is to create an environment that is... Oh, I'm having trouble here. Says my connection is lost, Mike. Sorry, I've lost it. Okay. I've advanced the slides for you, Jim. Okay. Well, I can't see what I'm meaning. So, okay, so in a perfect world, we will have good products. And so when we're talking about wood, we have to think about the fact that wood itself degrades and any cellulosic materials can outcast of all the organic compounds. And so we have to think about whether we can seal them either using barrier films or liquid coatings or other methods of... or using other materials within the case. So plywood all have glue involved, and so some of those glues... Okay, we're going back. Some of those glues are made with urea formaldehyde, which can be harmful, so we want to try to find materials that are made with a phenol formaldehyde glue, which is less harmful. MDF is a composite board that is basically compressed wood fibers, and the glues and those same thing. We want to try to find the least harmful products. So... And I did make a handout with a bunch of different materials, so I'm not going to go over each and every one here. So also within the case, you can have plastics and foams. Each of those can have their own chemical makeup. Some of that will vary by manufacturer, so you want to consider what possible contaminants are going to come from those, and even fabrics can't be considered safe without testing. Excuse me. And then as you paint your case, you want to look for low VOC finishes. VOC stands for Volatile Organic Compounds. Latex paints, water-based polyurethanes are considered safer than oil or solvent-based finishes. So how can we have some control over these pollutants in the case environment? The first is, of course, to seal the wood and to keep it out of the case altogether. So we'll take a look at one method of sealing or encapsulating wood that's within the case environment. We can control the rate of air exchange, which is to use gaskets to limit the amount of air that's either coming into or leaving the case. You can use absorbents like Artsorb or Oxygen Scavengers to basically capture the pollutants and hold them away from the objects. You can actually put in active ventilation. Sometimes your object is the thing that is out-guessing, and it could affect other objects in the case, so you want to pull air out of the case or through the case using fans and filters. And you're going to hear a lot about audio testing as you go through your museum careers. And the audio test is a useful tool, and I have a little video here from the Indianapolis Museum of Art that will explain what that is. Tests that have been run. The audio test uses metal coupons, silver, lead, and a copper coupon, and they're fitted into platinum cured silicone stoppers like this. These are the most expensive part of the test. We put a little bit of water into one of these capillary tubes, slip it into the test vessel. We'll take two grams of the material that we're testing. We've tested paint in here. We've tested wood veneer material here that we didn't expect to get good results. This is some silicone tape. The objects conservators wanted to see if it was safe to use. I've got ultra suede. We use this to cover mounts, and we test every color because with different dye stuff you can get different results. So we put two grams of our sample in the tube. We put in water in the little capillary tube. We've got our metal coupons and our silicone stopper, and we seal the tube, and then we pop it in an aging oven that's set at 60 degrees centigrade, and we keep it in there for 28 days. What we want to see is does any corrosion form on any of these metals? Is there some acidic component that's off-gassing? Is there something that's going to cause problems with the entire metal? We extrapolate from this. Maybe it's not metal that you're exhibiting, but if there is material that is causing problems with metals, then we'll choose not to use that for long-term or even sometimes for short-term temporary. So screening method, that helps us a lot. Okay. I'm not sure if all of you were able to see the whole video, but I'm going to move on because it looked like it ended on my end. So the Audi test basically, you put the material in, you test it against social metals, and while it's not a perfect test, it's a very useful way so that we can see if materials are out-gassing at all, and then we extrapolate from that and use that to determine what's safe and what is not. If you're like me, you have to be very careful with your budget, and smaller institutions, they're going to be challenged to meet the ideal in terms of materials and products because, A, the materials are often quite expensive. If you're not in a city, then finding the materials in the first place can be a little trickier. Luckily, the Internet exists for us, but you will have to pay freight to get things in, so that's a consideration. And then Audi testing is expensive, so it's difficult for a smaller institution to dedicate that kind of time and material for doing it. But what can we do to find the best materials? Well, luckily, these folks seem to like to share what they know, and so there are some excellent resources available out there. The first of which is the Conservation Wiki, and they have an Audi test material database that people contribute to and they'll submit their test results for specific products and share that so that you can look up products there and basically use other folks' data to make your decisions. STASH is another great organization on the web that tests and releases information about products. So even while they're more focused on storage, a lot of that information is to remain to making casework. This book is probably the Bible on museum pollutants by Pamela Hatchfield. I would highly recommend that if you don't have a copy, you get one. She goes through a lot of the different materials and the considerations and what you need to look for. Brent Powell has a great book on collection care that also includes some information about materials testing. But at the end of the day, you're going to have to do the best you can with what you have available. I mean, everyone's reality is going to be a little bit different. We all love to do it at the same level as the big boys, but that's not always going to be possible. So you need to do your homework on the objects, find out what their vulnerabilities are, and then seek out what the best solutions are going to be for you. The solution is going to work for every three-type of object. So now we've kind of gone over a little bit about materials. We can't really go that far in depth without getting too crazy. So let's move on and start talking about what you'll need to set up a shop to actually build the products that you need. There's another video screen. So, you know, first of all, you're going to need a basic set of hand tools. This is just the run-of-the-mill stuff that you'll be familiar with, hammers and mallets, screwdrivers, various different types, and measuring tools of various stripes. Some of you might already have a lot of the stuff in your shops, for sure, wrenches and sockets, in case you need to use longer fasteners or fasteners that just require that, you know, basic pliers. So this is all pretty standard stuff. And we're going to go over all these in a little bit more detail in a minute. But you also will need power hand tools. I don't really talk about hand saws because they're not going to be useful in this kind of construction unless you're supremely talented. There we go again. So, in power hand tools, we're going to be needing to look at jig saws and circular saws for cutting, drills for making holes and driving fasteners, routers for cutting and profiling, joining tools for assembly, standards for finishing, top saws for cross cutting and cutting angles. And then we will also need to, if your budget and your space allows, and you're going to set up a full permanent shop, then you'll look at stationary equipment like table and band saws, perhaps a jointer and planer. And that's it for getting into more solid wood construction. The drill press for drilling more accurate and better holes. And if you can really afford a panel saw for sizing down sheet goods and cutting larger materials. One of the things that's going to be critical, of course, if you are not familiar at all with woodworking, is safety. I can't stress enough that woodworking is a dangerous occupation and at the very least, you will need to provide for yourself and your staff good eye protection, hearing protection, protection from respiratory irritants because wood dust is potentially carcinogenic. And so you will also want to spend time finding a good place to get training, hands-on training with woodworking tools. So moving on again, we'll just take a quick, more thorough look at some of the power tools that you're going to encounter. So hand tools you probably already have a pretty good idea how to use. And if you don't, maybe this isn't the field you want to go into. So first, you'll want to have drills handy. Drills are great for not only making holes, but also for shooting fasteners, building the cabinets, installing the shows. They're very useful. You'll probably want a cordless one because they're more portable. Portable ones are slightly more powerful and hammer drills if you have concrete in your institution. The jigsaw is a great tool for making curved cuts and rough cuts in lumber and also if you need to make a hole in a panel. So that's what a jigsaw is used for. Circular saw is probably going to be the workhorse if you don't have a stationary equipment. That's going to be the tool that you can go to for straight cuts and angled cuts and for making cabinet tree. Routers are also going to be very useful hand tools. The cutting bit is perpendicular to your ear cut. I just got my slides back. And they can be used to cut profiles, to cut grooves, to use with templates to make complex shapes repeatable. And then a chopper miter saw is good to have in your shop for doing the framing work for a cross-cutting lumber, basically cutting angles, miters, and lumber. And sanders will help you finish your casework. So you'll want to look at a couple of different kinds of sanders, like an oscillating or a random orbit to make a good finish on your cabinet. Other hand tools you might want to look at are pneumatic tools, which are air powered instead of electrical powered. They'll help you shoot fasteners. You can buy drills and sanders that are pneumatic, but I'm really more concentrated on the fastener shooting type. Biscuits and domino joiners are ways to join wood without showing any fasteners or having holes to patch. And these work by cutting mating slots in the two pieces of wood that are then joined with a third piece that slips in between them. If you're buying a router, you can buy it with a fixed base, which is what you think, or a plunge base where you can actually go in in light passes and cut multiple passes in wood, or start and stop a cut on a panel at precise spots. Laminate trimmer is just a small router that you can use for trimming or chamfering. And then if you do need to include some metal in your work, you might want to have an angle grinder on hand. But if you have the space, you're going to want to set up a permanent shop. And the first tool you'll want to buy is a table saw. This is the workhorse of the shop. It makes accurate straight cuts. The fence makes everything repeatable, so you're making things exactly the same size. The blade tilts so you can cut miters and doubles. It's really the most useful tool in the shop. Second to that is the bandsaw, which is a loop blade, basically a big circle. That runs on wheels. And the bandsaw excels at cutting curves. It's also really useful if you're cutting foam. But it's a good enough tool for making straight cuts, too. A drill press is going to help you with precise hole drilling, including being able to stop the depth of your hole so if you're setting magnets in to hold panels in place, that's a really good thing to be able to do. The jointer and planer are really a little bit more advanced. They're more for solid woodworking. But what they can do is help you if you have lumber that's not particularly straight and flat. You can straighten it out and make a millier lumber to the exact dimension that you want. This is a stationary sander, which is a good tool for just shaping and sort of trimming wood, or for just shaping more random-shaped objects. And lastly, this is the panel saw, which is essentially a hybrid of a circular saw and a table saw, meaning that you bring the wood to it, but then you move the saw carriage through the wood itself. And this is just going to save your back and allow you to make really good, accurate cuts in your panels. Now, the machines basically are just the motors, and the blades are what is going to do the work. So I'm going to just really quickly go through some of the blades you'll want to look at. All of these I would highly recommend for saw blades, especially circular saw blades, getting carbide tooth blades because they'll last longer. So these are essentially a disc with teeth on the edges. A crosscut blade is going to have more teeth for cutting across the grain smoothly. A rip blade has fewer teeth and maps because you're cutting parallel to the grain, and the stringiness of the wood can bind up, and so fewer teeth is better. But often you just want to buy a combination blade, which will do both jobs pretty well, and it's a lot more versatile. If you're getting into specialty materials like plastics, there are specialty blades for that. And then this is a dado set, and these you stack up the number of blades you need to cut the width of a groove in the wood, and they're going to be really useful in the dado joint that I show you in a few slides from now. Sand saw blades you choose based on their width and their teeth count, the narrower the blade, the tighter the radius that you can cut, and the finer the tooth, the smoother the cut will be. And so on the left there is a metal cutting blade, which is almost like a hacksaw, so you can get quite a variety there. Excuse me. Okay, so getting away from saw blades, these are router bits. There are hundreds of kinds available for lots of different profiles, lots of different purposes. The straight bits will cut straight flat bottoms through or follow a template. The bearing guided bits will allow you to do edge work or to follow a template again. You can make moldings, you can make dovetails. There's just a lot you can do with various types of router bits. And drill bits are also, there's a lot of variety there, too. So, you know, the basic one you're familiar with is probably the twist bits in that yellow box in the lower left. But there are also spade bits, which are in the upper right, which cut bigger holes that are kind of rough. Forthner bits, which are in the lower right, which cut very precise flat bottoms holes, which are great for setting magnets. Counter-sink bits are sitting on the white piece of paper. And those are used to cut a hole that has a recess for the screw head, and it helps keep your wood from splitting and also makes it easier to fill the holes when you do choose a screw. And then Brad point bits in the upper left just tend to go straighter through the wood because they have a leading point. Clamps, you can't have too many or too many types. So, I'll just go through these real quick. A pipe clamp is... Let me grab my little arrow here. Oops, I'm not going to go. So, the pipe clamp is the orange-headed one right here. And that is a cheap way to get good clamps. You just buy the heads and then buy cheap black pipe to make the rest of it. Bar clamps come in a couple different varieties. The Bessie clamps, which are this one and this one have parallel jaws, so they help when you're building cases to keep everything squared up. A light-duty bar clamp, this guy. It's just really useful for a variety of different clamping applications. These I didn't picture, but they're a wooden head clamp that's real gentle on materials. Band clamp kind of surrounds this whole group of clamps and that's... It's great if you're building mitered cases. You can just bind them around and tighten everything at once and do all four joints at once. And then miter clamps are... You can buy some large ones. These are just little spring clamps that work to hold miters together while they dry. C clamps up here and A clamps are just, you know, standard, good clamps to have around. Okay. First things first, this is not a lesson in woodworking, but I'm going to show you how to make a couple of the basic cuts for cabinet building using a circular saw and a table saw. I really highly advise you to get good training. And these are the three basic joints that we're going to cover. The butt joint on the left... my arrow here is just basically cutting two boards at 90 degrees and putting them together side by side or perpendicularly, excuse me. The miter joint, you're going to cut the boards at an angle and those angles will mate. The nice thing about a miter joint is this clean edge. If you're doing a butt joint or a dado, you're going to have plywood edge showing here and that'll have to be dealt with with your sanders. And then thirdly, a dado joint is a very good, strong, self-aligning joint. And I'll show you real quickly how you can do that. So this is going to be a really brief primer on using a circular saw to make a cut. First thing you want to do is mark your sheet where you want that cut to be. And what I didn't say about the circular saw earlier was that you really would do well to buy a very good straight edge guide to work with because that is going to be critical to getting square cabinets. Excuse me. So you'll measure the distance from the edge of the base plate of your saw to the tooth of the saw blade and keep that measurement handy because you're always going to set your guide that far away from where you want the cut to be. So the key here, so I was going to cut an inch off this panel and so my saw has a very odd dimension of 5-1-16. So this is set to 6-1-16 away from the edge of the board and you'll double and triple check that measurement and clamp it in place with C-clamps. When you set your saw, set it about an eighth of an inch thicker or deeper than the thickness of your board because you don't really have to have your blade sticking way below. It's not safe and there's no real benefit to it. And then you align your saw up. You can see here with the edge along your straight edge, you'll start off the board, get the motor running, and then push it through nice and cleanly and keep moving all the way until your blade safety cover snaps back into place and shut off the motor and you've just made a good straight square cut. Now with a circular saw, it depends on the manufacturer. Some of these you can set to tilt at a 45-degree angle to cut miters with and that can be really useful. So that was the circular saw. I'm kind of blind blinded. So now I'm going to cover the table saw and that's going to be a lot more controllable. The table saw is essentially just a circular saw flipped upside down and mounted to the table. So you're moving the wood through the blade rather than moving the blade through the wood. So I'm not going to be sure right now which slides are coming up, but you're going to want to check to make sure you have a good straight edge that's going to ride against the fence. That's first and foremost. And then you will set the fence to the exact position that you want, size that you want to cut. Again, you're going to set the depth of your saw to just slightly deeper than the thickness of the wood. And I find it's really useful to make sure that your wood is in a handy position before you turn on the saw. So if you're going to cut a stack of boards, you want to have them ready to go right nearby. And then you'll fire up your saw and put the straight edge against the fence. Hold it down firmly to the table and against the fence and slide it through and push all the way past the blade to make sure that you're clear because the most dangerous part is just on the backside of the blade. And so once you've done that, if you have multiple boards to cut, you can just keep running them without resetting the fence. Hopefully I covered everything that was on that slide because I can't see it right now. And I'm going to move on to cutting a rabbit and dado joint on the table saw. So you're going to want to set the inside of the groove exactly the distance equal to the thickness of the wood being used. So I tend to work from reality and I'll use a natural piece of plywood against the fence and set the blade there. And then that way I'm sure when that joint is put together, the face of the board with the rabbit is going to be flush with the edge of the board that has the dado groove. And it'll take some practice and some test pieces. I typically keep a lot of wood handy and do tests with scraps. And you'll want to just keep dialing it in until you get as perfect a fit as you can when those two are flipped together. With the router, it's very similar to using the circular saw in terms of you're going to set the grated guide the distance from the edge of the bit to the edge of the base away from your cut. You're going to set the depth of the cut. What's going on? I'm having a problem here. Okay, it's blind, blind. So you're going to use a straight fit and you're going to set that and do test cuts just like you would on the table saw. And if you're using a bearing-guided bit, you're going to use me for one second, please. I apologize for this. I can't see my slides right now. But you will have to keep the guide to the left side of the router as you're cutting because the speed of the bit will pull the router against the fence as you're going and help you control the cut better. Okay, so Jim, we're just going to move on to the last bullet of the cutting rabbit and dado joints at the moment. Okay, I don't have internet at all, Mike. I don't know what's going on, but something is not connecting anymore. Okay, well, let's go ahead with the slides. Do you have a copy of the PowerPoint in front of you? And I'll just go ahead and advance for the participants. Okay, if you can just give me a second to get that slide up, I'll be right with you. I apologize, I should have that in the background. While they're doing that, I just first I can give Jim a minute to do that. I just want to make a point that obviously there's a lot involved in trying to do your cases in-house. It's something that you don't want to do. Obviously, you can get someone else to do it. And it's a value to see what's involved in the detail and what a contractor could offer. So if you're not interested in doing all this work, I think this information is valuable to kind of really understand the dynamics of what goes into making cases. So keep that in mind. I think it does come into play even if you don't want to do this yourself. It's also good to be able to speak with any contractors that you might be using trying to speak their language a little bit. Exactly. So this is... All right, well, we're going to just jump ahead a little bit. I talked about cutting some joints, assembling the cases you're going to use your clamps and hold them together. You can shoot a variety of fasteners, screws, nails, biscuit joints, and I'll kind of skip over that a little bit and hopefully these slides will be available for you to take a look through once they come back online. I'm originally having some computer issues right now and can't even pull up in my PowerPoint. So as Mike's advancing the slide, let's go to a basic pedestal without the train and we'll start talking about the actual casework and what it's going to look like as you're building it. Go ahead whenever you're ready. Okay. Sorry about that. So the basic pedestal is... You've probably all seen these in museums. It's a basic plywood box construction. The corners can be joined with any of those joints that we just talked about and it's just going to depend on your preferences and your tooling. The top deck, which is the recessed area under the vitrine, that can be sealed to reduce the pollutants that we had discussed earlier. I'm going to show you how to do that with some marble seal on the next couple of slides. But the rabbet around the edge is going to receive the vitrine and you'll get that really smooth classic look. Now there are lots of other ways to dress this up. You can put frames around the underside of the vitrine. You can make your cabinets as decorative as you want, but this is going to be just the basic idea of what you can accomplish with that. Some handy tips. You're going to want to have leveling seats because if your museum is like mine, the floors are not level. The toe kick that I've kind of on this drawing shown, that little recess at the bottom, it gives you a kind of a transition between the cabinet and the floor so that can be painted to match your floor or it can be the same material as the floor, but it also serves as a place that can hold ballast if you have a top heavy, or a particularly heavy piece on top and you want to make sure you're counterweighted. So it serves a couple of different things. As far as the vitrine itself goes, I highly recommend that you find a good contractor in your area that can do the fabrication for you. Building with plexiglass is difficult. It's toxic. It requires specialty tools, and it's just not really something that just anyone can do. So here are a couple of different ideas. So the toe kick you can see in the top left is just like a little reveal, and I usually put a gusset in the corner, put in a threaded insert, and then use leveling feet. And then that way I can make sure that my cabinet fits stable, is perfectly plumb, and the object isn't going to be at risk of vibration. And as I said, you can put a full board across that and add weight to counterweight on the top heavy installation issue. The top deck I build separately from the case and then screw in from the underside. And that way I can completely encapsulate that with Marvel Seal, upholster it, and it keeps all the pollutants out from the rest of the box out of the case. And so in the upper right, you can see what just the bottom part of the pedestal looks like. So to isolate the deck, there are a couple of ways, but mostly museums are using Marvel Seal, which is a laminated polyethylene film with nylon and aluminum, and that is probably the best vapor barrier available on the market right now. If you think about your daily yogurt, that's what they use to seal those little plastic cups. And so one of the nice things about Marvel Seal is that it can be tacky when it's heated, and so you can iron it directly onto the wood. And so I wrap it around the edges and make the cleanest corner I can. And then on the underside, I'll wrap it around, but then use foil tape, because hopefully my gasket is going to protect, you know, that little bit that's less in the middle from gassing into the cabinet. When you're poultrying it, just try to avoid stapling through the barrier, because anytime you perforate it, you're going to reopen the wood and allow some gasses to get out. So if you can avoid it, that's the best. And so with the gasket on the vitrine wedge, and so what I'm talking about is putting it right on that top edge, and then the vitrine will sit on top of it and so will this deck, and that should seal everything off within the case. And Marvel Seal is available through Gaylord and conservation materials and a lot of other conservation suppliers, so you should be able to get your hands on that pretty readily. Now, that's a basic pedestal, and as I said, you can dress these up however you want. There are a couple hundred thousand options of what you can actually do with it depending on how much design work you want to do. But I wanted to show you one other option, which is space saver pedestals. And I designed these for our institution because, like many of us, I have very little storage space, and I need to maximize that to the extent possible. So these pedestals are built with a separate base and top, and the base itself breaks down. And what I do is use bed hardware, and that allows me to pack these flat like IKEA, and I can fit all the legs for all the pedestals I have on one cart in my storage. And then the boxes can stack on pallet racking or shelving, and so I can stack those up as high as my ceiling allows. And that really is a great space-saving plan, I guess. And so this last one on the lower right is the underside of the deck, and so those little ribs will walk into the slots on the base and then they're screwed together. And these have leveling feet and everything, so they work pretty well. And in my case, I have a raised deck on these. These are painted, they're not marble-sealed. And if you want to, you can incorporate a desiccant chamber or some kind of an absorbent chamber with scavengers to reduce pollutants in your deck. So that's really, there's not that much to say about pedestals. There's basically a box with a display surface on the top. And so if you have questions about other ideas for pedestals, please let me know and we'll try to get to those. But for now I'm going to move on to building some simple wall cases. And these are used in my museum. There's two types. One is just basically a shadow box frame in the lower left and the other is a four-sided between a wall case and that's on a wall wedge. So these are a little bit more finished than a basic shelf and they're very secure. I have a couple different designs that I use. This is one that's a little easier to build than the wedge shape which is basically just a box and a frame. It hangs on a cleat on the wall. So these are just matching bevels that slip together. You've probably seen those in other cases. And you can modify these in a number of different ways to include label rails or pin boards. Your mounts can screw directly into the back. They're lightweight. They're easy to move around. And they keep your floor space clear. And as far as building them, they're pretty simple. It's basically just a back frame that's made out of plywood and then a simple torsion box on the bottom. You can kind of see the construction here. So this can be shot together with pneumatic nailers or screws. You can use miter joints, butt joints, data joints, whatever you want. But your deck and back are separate. And so if you need to seal them to protect the objects inside from pollutants, they can be wrapped in marble sealed and then assembled with gaskets. And then hopefully you can see here a little bit better how that French cleat works, which is just the board behind has a bevel that points out and the board on the top of the case has a bevel that points in and they just slip together. It's very secure. They'll hold a ton of weight. And if you'd like to get a little bit fancier with these, you can build a raised deck. You can put in desiccant chambers. You can use the wedge-shaped base, which makes the bottom of the case essentially disappear, which is a nice aesthetic choice. And these are something that you can flip into any gallery. You can build them probably up to about 24 inches deep before they get too unwieldy. But for small objects, they're very useful to have. And then the shadow box is just a very simple frame. You can actually use your existing wall as the back of the case if you want to, or you can rabbit the back of the box so that the panel will sit in and you can install a French cleat with these to hang them on the wall. And then the face is just a very simple frame that can hold your flex glass. And I tend to use just a really simple hardware and these two-hole glass shelves so that I can light them without having shadows cast too far down. The one thing about shadow boxes, it's kind of difficult to make an isolated case because your wood is part of it. And so I would only use these for objects like glass or ceramics that you don't have to worry so much about, pollutants within your environment. And I finally got my slideshow back so I'm going to hopefully catch up to all of you and what you're looking at. Okay. So there we are. That's a real brief primer on wall cases. Again, your design is only limited by your imagination. So if you have some ideas and have questions about it, I would be happy to answer that. So we'll move on and we'll talk about platforms and plinths, which is kind of the biggest thing for me is using these. And how much is enough? Well, enough is enough. I think that you can build these as lightweight as you can depending on the objects that have to go on them. So really, you can make that determination if you're showing a Richard Sarah, then you're going to have to engineer this to death. For me, most of what I'm working on weigh about 40 pounds and so I don't really need a huge robust structure. You can make these bespoke just one of a kind to suit the exhibition or the architecture of your space or you can build them as components that you can store and reuse and that's oftentimes beneficial if you use them a lot. Standard sizes are great because if you base them on the size of lumber that you get, then there's less cutting involved and it makes it easier when you're doing your exhibition design to plan your space. In platforms, because the objects are out in open air, you really can use materials with less concern about what kind of pollutants there are. I tend to use MDF, I have MDF for the tops of mine. Again, I don't have to carry a ton of weight but MDF can be stinky so I do prime and paint it to seal it so it doesn't make my exhibition space smell like my shop and as you're designing these you want to think about the hazards, how you want to design for wheelchair access, what kind of traffic patterns you need to be able to build to support. Just based on my own experience I would highly recommend you stay away from acute angles in platforms because they can be problematic. So if you're building them as components you will want to choose a standard size that works best for you. Plywood and MDF come in a variety of sizes. They're 4x8 foot, 4x10 foot, 5x12 foot. So whatever you can store, whatever is going to work best for you, just design to that standard. Can you store them efficiently is a question only you can answer but if you can't then you might want to consider building them with knockdown hardware so that you can again IKEAize these and break them into flat boards and just set them aside in small piles. And then I highly recommend you build a variety of heights because you don't want to have just a static straight platform. You want to have some design options and so even if you're building them all to 4x8 maybe some are 6 inches tall, some are 12 inches tall, some are 18 inches but that's an aesthetic choice. When it comes to fit and finish so if you're building platforms and you have a large area to go with you're going to have seams so you're going to have to decide how much punishment that's going to have to take. If you want your seams to be invisible then your structure is going to have to meet and support those seams so that as people are installing artwork they're not cracking all your hard work and making them unsightly. What I tend to do is to not hide the seams but use them as a design element so I chamfer the edges of where all the boards meet. So there's a clean seam it's obvious but it looks more like it's a design element rather than a mistake. And then if you don't have time to dress up the front edge you can overhang the top of the framework by a couple inches and that hides all that work underneath and it's a lot quicker for installation. Paint should be at least an egg shell finish just because you're going to have people inevitably stepping on them unless your guards are really on top of things but even then during installation it makes it easier to clean and just a word of caution if you are making white platforms like in the photographs make sure your technicians do not wear dark wash jeans that day. If there's an area that requires access like in my case my light switches are over a platform and so I put down a thin sheet of frosted acrylic with the frosted side up and that way people can walk on that without soiling the platforms. So we're coming to the end of this some things that I'd like to have you think about are that you don't always have to make things square and straight and flat. You can easily make circles using a band saw and they look great under certain kinds of objects they remove trip hazards if you've got a good chop saw or table saw you can make regular polygons of any number of sides and honeycombs walk together in a really cool way so there are ways that you can add some punts to your exhibit. You can use multiple sizes and stack them up like a ziggurat you can really add a little pop to your exhibits that way. In the case that's in the photograph I was thinking we had black garments in a white gallery and I wanted to add a little bit of texture to the show so I built three different angled platforms and the boards are twisted so you can add a lot of visual interest to your spaces by just experimenting a little bit. There are also simple ways to make ellipses there are YouTube videos about different jigs that you can build to cut shapes. And there are materials available if you want to make curved spaces like bendable plywood like curved core and wiggle wood that you can buy that you can get a really nice smooth face even on a curved platform surface. I encourage you as you develop schools or as you develop your ideas step up your game. The case that's pictured here is from the V&A's free to color exhibition and they've gone to incorporating mirrors and light and really made it a pretty powerful presentation. You can work with your architecture and try to reflect that in the cases that you build bring in some really funky design that matches the objects that you've got in the show. If your objects are especially sensitive you can really look more deeply into how you can actively clean the environment within the case by building desiccant chambers. I didn't really touch too much on special materials but there are some great aluminum panels plastics that you can use that are bendable, shapeable, have brighter colors and those are all worth exploring if you have the time in the budget. And then there are a lot of articles out in the world on museum casework. This is just one example of what I'm sharing on looking into what the big museums are doing and trying to emulate them at whatever scale you can achieve. I constantly go to different resources and try to find out what can I do if I had a budget and if I don't have the budget then how can I scale it down and I do have to put in a plug for packing in that respect. There's a great forum on our website where people share ideas and you can learn a lot. Here we go. So that is all I have. I apologize for the spotting this, I lost my slides a few times so I would be more than happy to answer any questions that you have. All right, thank you Jim. You did a really good job on keeping the boss in the air as you came in and out with your presentation so good job. We have a few questions. First one was one of the viewers wanted to have more examples of barrier film examples other than the marble seal or are there other ones they can consider using? Yeah, there's marble seems to be the most accepted one. There's a liquid called Camder 176 that had been initially tested and was successful but over time they found that just because wood is an organic material and it expands and contracts that the film wouldn't hold up to that and so it eventually broke down. John's Aaron in that article they actually used that as the glue for their wood joints. They used the Camder as the glue and that helps somewhat but he actually builds all of his case interiors out of aluminum. You can use Formica as a barrier but you have to bear in mind that the context that you use is not very friendly and needs to cure for a long time and outgas for a long time before you would put it within a case. But I really don't think there's that much if you can laminate aluminum onto a plywood if you have that kind of skill and tooling available. A balance of trying to consider how well the objects contain within the case and how the pollutants are going to be either released and trying to control that in another way compared to sacrificial elements could help maybe compensate where you might not have the right barrier film or something like that or trying to have layers of protection obviously is the best. Right and it really all comes down to what is it that you're showing in the case. If you're showing ceramics or stone really pretty much don't have to think about it. At that point you would just maybe separate if your deck was painted with latex paint you would separate it with a little bit of mylar cut to the shape that's in direct contacts that you don't end up with any kind of paint transfer or if it's a plastic object plasticizer migration between the paint and the object. The next one was a question when the other attendees helped answer the question so I'll just kind of lay it out so you can see where it lands up. They were talking about the French cleats in the wall cases and getting attached to the wall. Obviously we're talking about ideally you want to hit the stud to get a nice good bite but depending on where that case is going on the wall we were talking about toggle bolts in the discussion so make sure everybody didn't catch it in the general chat. The recommendation was toggle bolts for a hollow wall wherever you couldn't hit a stud but there's also you got to make sure you have a hollow wall. It's a solid wall obviously there's other anchors out there specifically made for solid walls but having that cleat as you know allows you to distribute that weight the whole case and the objects so depending on the weight capacity of that anchor times the number of anchors you use would help distribute that weight. So we've kind of went around with some of the ideas on that through the general chat I don't know if you have anything to add to that or we can go to the next question. I mean yeah you just have to think about what's going to actually go in the case if it's you know a couple of feathered fans and it's only the weight of the case that you have to hold up so maybe even something as simple as an easy anchor which is just a screw in drywall anchor would hold that much weight but I'd say probably hitting the stud is best in my museum the walls are back with plywood so I can pretty much shoot anywhere and I'm going to hit something really really tough if it's really heavy and you can only use the hollow part of the wall maybe your cleat is as wide as the top part but really tall and you can get more anchors in to distribute the weight even further but yeah I think I think toggles and mollies would be the way to go if you had to have hollow walls because remember all the weights going straight down so it's pulling perpendicular to the screws it's not like it's going to be pulling out from the wall. Right it's more of a sheer force. Yeah more of a sheer okay we had two questions kind of related to ADA requirements obviously you put that in mind when you're doing your casework and the layout of the exhibits and you take that and count but also there was a question was including you know low and low vision mobility issues so forth I mean what are the kinds of things that you've come up with that help meet those requirements. Yeah for example the wall mounted cases are a particular issue with people with vision impairments and so if that's a concern what's been recommended is to build a rail below it that is at a height that a cane would detect so that you have the ability for people with low vision to navigate around those. We had a case on campus there's a museum of hearing aids and in order to be ADA compliant they made all the cases three inches deep the problem was that their objects weren't all three inches deep and so they ended up really limiting what they could actually show so it is a matter of finding a balance but there are definitely ways that you can make them more friendly for visitors you know you'll want to hang the cases and hit their wall mounted cases and you have visitors that use wheelchairs you know don't put them so their knees are going to hit when they pull in because they'll probably want to get up a little bit closer so yeah there are definitely a lot of issues around that and not all the time it's going to be as elegant. Pedestals um do you have a certain height that you try and meet? I know obviously the object can dictate a different dimension but is there some kind of standard you'd like to use? I usually use 40 inches for a standard pedestal it's a little higher than a tabletop so that your visitor doesn't have to stoop down but it's low enough that a person who's in a chair has good visibility for the case rarely would I go above 40 inches and then like you said if it's a really tall object it can go much lower alright alright Ian next question one of your gallery photos had modular walls and they were asking if you build them yourself and are they reusable? I do and I thought about covering that in this talk and then I thought about trying to fit it all into an hour and I could do an hour just on those walls um yes I built them myself that's the second design that I have come up with those are multiple ribs that have cutouts in them so you can walk inside the wall to bolt them together so they're basically four by eight foot by two foot wall units and they are on wheels each unit has its own set of wheels and each unit has its own set of leveling feet so I can really tweak them right into position so the first step that I built I tried to use that bed hardware like I did with my modular pedestals and just getting them to line up and hold together was um too tricky and they never were quite satisfactory to me so these um you know I talked about on the platforms showing the seams off well with a wall you don't necessarily want to do that so these actually have mating rebels so when they walk together they're pretty flat so so yeah you can build them yourself those are the ribs are three quarter inch plywood and I used a design that I generated for a CNC router to initially cut them and then found that it was faster to just do them ourselves and then the skin of the wall is just MDO plywood which is not a craft paper face on it so you don't have to prime them and just build them and paint them and you're ready to go but yeah I could go on about those yeah I was going to think we could do a whole presentation or workshop and portable walls and I may have posted something on the pack and form about those walls so it might actually exist already on the pack and form on the website um the question is what do you recommend for rods for hanging textiles such as quilts the sleeves on the back ooh boy that um that depends on your quilt um at a minimum we would sew on a muslin sleeve and use um it's so subjective to the piece sometimes we just sew a velcro um a sleeve on the back but put velcro on it and hang that directly onto a velcro board on the wall um if it's a particularly fragile quilt um you're going to want to use a larger diameter tube maybe a two inch blue archival tube and make a system to suspend that out from the wall um and we have one quilt that can't bend at all so that has to go out on a flat plant board because it's got shattered silk as part of it and so it's just degrading all by itself so we um we can't even hang that on the wall so it's really subjective to what the object state is um we did a Connecting to Collections Care Webinar that covers all of that and I will post it in the handout we have one more question what vendor would you recommend for Audi tested fabric for case interiors um I would look at test fabrics um they tend to have pretty good materials and there's another vendor who I will send to Susan to put on the discussion list because I can't think of their name off the top of my head um but you know with any of those two it's that's slightly subjective because different runs of the same material might test differently so you know if you can't test it yourself you go with reputable sources and um hope that they haven't changed their manufacturing process since they were tested so alright we've got one more okay and the possibility of finding a barrier film uh you was listed can I use some specific type of painting so some sort of uh sealer if you couldn't use a barrier basically we mentioned the camphor before is there anything else that people can use as a sealer well um you know it depends on the object if it's um if the objects aren't fragile a low VOC latex paint is fine, ceramic glass um perhaps even gold since it doesn't tarnish but I'd be really hesitant to do that without conservators sign off um but I think that you really want to try to find some way to separate that if the objects are fragile um I think that marble feels pretty available but I'm not sure um if it's always in the budget for smaller institutions camphor I've used camphor I think it's a fine product but like I said I you can't um entirely control how much natural movement there's going to be in the wood in response to humidity changes or temperature changes and once that splits then um you know you've spent a lot of time and it's not as clean an environment as you would have wanted so okay uh there's another really good question here could you talk a little bit more about your role in the exhibition planning process are you brought in in the beginning of the planning stages with some design ideas um yes my whole job title is exhibition designer preparator so I'm soup to nuts in my institution because we're a very small staff um so yeah I'm brought in right at the gut go and so we don't have a staff conservator we have we belong to a regional conservation lab and we get advice from them we have colleagues at other local museums who we can call on and we'll bounce ideas off of them and make decisions with their input and through our own research to um you know to find the best solutions but yeah when it comes to designing the spaces and everything I'm the person who's looking into you know are we accessible um are we limiting our audience by what we're building are we putting anybody in danger um so yeah that's my role is kind of right there at the gut go but if it wasn't you were just doing the cases I would think you'd want to be in those early uh planning stages and meetings which I think this person is getting to which is I think is crucial because uh you know the more you have time to really look at the situation in the in the problems that could arise and how to solve those problems the better I would think yeah I mean your cases should be um you know considered right up front as far as preventive conservation goes so your conservators should be working with your your case designers your case fabricators and making sure that um they're meeting all the requirements for the objects that are with them just for that balance there's nothing worse than having a curator who has some idea about what something should look at like and it's just not something that the designers and the preparators can do yeah it's that balance of practicality and preservation and design yeah and I have to be prepared for the unexpected with some of this I was at the um material conference a couple years ago at the Smithsonian and uh Indianapolis Museum was talking about their casework for their African exhibition and they tested everything I mean they can do their own in-house audio testing they tested every finish on every board that went into the cases and when they moved objects after it was time to rotate them out they found all this discoloring on the basis themselves and it turned out it wasn't the cases it was the objects that was polluting the inside of the cases and so you know that's where more active ventilation can come in yeah and along that lines in January um we're going to be doing a free webinar on microclimate and how to build them and how to determine what they should be and that kind of stuff so that um you know pay attention to our website to see when that comes up I'll probably post it in December great I think we're we're done um I will I will put together a conservation suppliers list I'll add the um the quilt webinar to the handouts and um maybe you can get me a link to the article on portable walls and I'll post that and I'll also post the assignment and the the quiz and keep talking in the discussion list and I think we'll see you next week with Brent Powell talking about safety um and installing exhibits thank you all for all the nice pictures that you sent of measuring light in your museum yes that was great yeah that's it thank you Mike and thank you Jim and um I think you did really well considering that you