 who welcome you and to pass things off to our host, Susan Barker. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. This is our last webinar for 2018, but there's more in Starl for next year, and so we hope you all have a happy holiday. And so I just want to run through my usual slides. This is, you should join C2CC Announce List. It's the best way to keep up with what we're doing. It's only for announcements. It's only used by the most three times a month, usually not. And right on. Yes, okay. And Facebook and Twitter, you can follow us there, too. If you need help due to a disaster, this is the number 24-7 for the National Heritage Responders. They are very helpful. And we used to have a forum, but the forum has moved, and we're now on the higher logic thing, so join it. And if you have questions, feel free to ask them. We're there to answer questions and to help you care for your collections. And you can always contact me. This is my email address. And I'm happy to solve problems. And so in January, our first webinar is on silica gel and microclimates. So be sure to turn in for that. That is currently posted, so if you want to sign up, you can. We're going to have a webinar on emergency planning for gardens in March, one on old loans in April, one on caring for your barrier in May. And there are more that are coming up. So stay tuned, look at the website. And we're having a course in February and March on collections management for smaller institutions with John Simmons. And then from March until June, we're having a longer course on reorg and storage management. So both of those should be posted soon. So it's way out for our ever-changing thing. And now I'm going to turn this over to Meg and Lisa, and we're going to have creating, boxing, basics. So thanks. And by the way, check out the video link below. Their videos are great. So, okay, bye-bye. Thanks, Susan. My name is Meg Colbert. I'm the director of production at BoxArt, which is a fine art packing and creating company located in Brooklyn. I've worked there since 1997, both as an art packer and now as the director of production where I oversee the crate shop and the packing department. And with me is Lisa Ludwig. Hi, I'm Lisa Ludwig. I worked at BoxArt for 10 years. I worked in the art packing department. Now I'm currently a full-time visual artist. So this webinar will provide you with a basic overview of some of the common methods and materials used when packing art in other objects. We hope to introduce you to some of the common vocabulary that you might encounter when dealing with a packing or creating project and also give you some sense of what kind of questions to ask when you're going to pack your object for transit or for storage. At the end of the webinar, we will be answering your questions. So please feel free to ask us about anything. You have questions or concerns about. So the first step in any creating project is to determine the needs of your object. Very basically, that is, what is your object made out of? What is its material? And then secondly, how is your crate going to be used? Is it going to be used for storage? Or is your crate going to be used for traveling or for transit? A lot of people might want to use their crate for both purposes. Why is there a difference? Well, the big difference is in the materials that you would be using in each of those applications. So the materials that you would use in a crate that you're going to use in transit are going to be a little bit different than the materials that you would use in a crate for storage. You know, one thing to consider to when you're packing is if it's going to travel, how many places is it going to travel to? That's a big consideration in something to think about when you're designing your packing solution. So there's a big difference between storage and traveling crates as we mentioned. And the biggest thing that you're going to see that's different is the types of foam that you use. So when you're packing something for transit, one of the biggest concerns and issues that you're going to deal with is the changes in temperature that your crate is going to experience. That's because your crate might go outside like on a loading dock or, you know, at the airport on a tarmac, in a warehouse, on a truck. And so these changes in temperature are things that you want to mitigate by using a thermal insulating foam. And there are sort of three main types of foams that you see used in art crates. And these are ufoam, esterfoam, and then polystyrene extruded foams. And these foams are generally dark gray, the ufoam and the esterfoam. And then the polystyrene extruded foam looks a lot like the kind of foam that you can buy at Home Depot to insulate yourself. Another type of foam that you see used a lot is shock-absorbing foams for transit and storage. And that's esofoam, which is a white plank foam. And it comes in various densities to support different weights of objects. And then another type of foam that you see is velara, which tends to come in thinner sheetings like eighth inch or quarter inch. And that's also a white closed-celled foam. So one of the biggest concerns in a storage situation is off-gassing. And esterfoam, ufoam, and polystyrene foams all off-gas. And what this means is that as these foams age, they decay or break down and they can off-gas into the closed interior of the crate and possibly affect your object, which is why in a storage situation you don't want to put anything into a crate that is fully lined with esterfoam or ufoam or polystyrene foams for more than 90 days. That's our general recommendation. If you're storing something for longer, a longer period of time than that, you're going to want to use, if you need to, a ethofoam, which is the white foam. Are there any other concerns besides just off-gassing in a storage crate, like what are some of those issues? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest concerns in a storage situation is you need to be able to find your object. So if you are putting something in a storage, you want to make sure that it's very easy to identify, either through labeling or so that it's visible in some way. So maybe when you open your storage container, you can quickly visually inspect your object. And that's going to be pretty different than the types of concerns that you have for transit, in terms you might not be as concerned as being immediately able to identify the objects from the exterior of the crate. In transit, your main concerns are really going to be vibration and shock. And just really briefly, I'm going to talk about vibration because it's a very complicated issue and there's a lot of research going on about it right now. But I think that in terms of the purpose of this webinar, we could just say that there's a difference. Yeah, I mean a lot of people think that vibration and shock are the same thing. What are the differences between the two? Yeah, and so the differences between vibration and shock in a very layman's terms is that shock is a sort of singular event, like an impact. And vibration is that constant state of vibration that an object will experience, for example, on a truck or on an airplane. But what we're going to be talking about a little bit more is shock, which is one of the ways that you can mitigate the effect of shock, like your crate being dropped a little bit or hit with another crate, is to use an appropriate type of foam and an appropriate amount of foam. The big concern in transit really though is the temperature fluctuations. And some people talk about this also in terms of like changes in humidity in the environment side of the crate. But most people's main concern is the actual drop in rays and temperature that these crates will go through. And so one of the ways that you mitigate that is by lining it in a thermal insulating foam. And then a big concern with a crate in transit is handling. What do you mean by handling? Well, mainly it's just how is somebody going to interact with your crate? How are they going to touch it? And as with all art packing and art creating, you want to kind of encourage good handling, good safe handling. And you can do this in a variety of ways. But with your crate, you want to make sure that it has handles so that people don't tip it using a J bar, for example, that they have a place to handle it safely. You want it to have skids so that they are going to use a forklift or a pallet jack that there's a place for it to fit underneath the crate. And, you know, clearly stencils with orientation stencils and any kind of, you know, directional stencils. One is that tell you what not to do. Like, don't leave this crate in the sun. Don't leave this crate in the rain. And then, you know, a really big concern with a crate that's traveling is when it gets packed and unpacked. The biggest concern in that situation is how clear the packing is. The person who encounters it may not be aware completely of what object they are encountering. And so you want to make it really clear to them how to unpack and pack, repack the crate. And that can be achieved through, well, very good packing, but also diagrams and written instructions. Yeah, sometimes if they're traveling to, like, another country or things like that, you may want to use symbols instead of words. So to, like, indicate where packing material would be replaced. And you can always use photographs now that, you know, it's pretty cheap and easy to print out photographs. And so taking a photograph of your finished packing solution is a good way to show someone how it should look when they need to repack it. So first of all, we're going to sort of go into some specific packing methods. Yeah, so this is going to be for storage or transit. Correct. Sometimes then we're starting with flat works. I know this term is used a lot in the industry, but I feel like it needs to be clarified. Yeah, so when we're talking about flat works, we're mostly talking about framed works, like photographs or paintings or drawings that are in sort of regular frames. And up here in this corner, you can kind of see this little framed drawing. And so these objects are regular, meaning that their shape is pretty predictable and regular. And so there's a relatively simple set of packing methods that are used to address their packing needs. So one of those would be trays, which are usually cardboard or foam core. And we use these trays as dividers in between works, which allows you to pack multiple works of different sizes into the same crate without those objects touching each other. We have videos specifically with these packing works, like we have a flat work, tray packing. We also have a shadow box. These are little videos that we have that you can see a little bit more of how they're made and the material. Yeah, so if you want a little illustration of them, maybe after the webinar you could watch those videos. Another common method for packing is a travel frame. Is a travel frame used whenever the flat work isn't framed? Yeah, that's correct. And so basically when you have an object like a canvas that doesn't have a frame, you don't want something to touch its face directly. Or maybe you have a flat work where it has a protrusion on the face like a collage or a combination where someone has put maybe a sculptural element on their flat work. In that case, you want to provide a solution where you're not directly touching the artwork. And in this case, we use travel frames or shadow boxes. Shadow frames are called a lot of different things, but what we're talking about is a wooden frame that you use to pack an artwork, usually with aus clips, which is a type of hardware, which allows you to screw the aus clip to the back of your artwork and then you attach the aus clip to the travel frame, thus avoiding having to touch the object with pads. Shadow boxes are sort of a simpler solution. It's usually cardboard or some core and we have, as Lisa was saying, a video of that up, but these provide some of the protection of a travel frame. You don't have to attach hardware to your artwork to use it. And then the final way you might pack a flat work would just be on its own and a crate using pads. So to go a little bit more in depth into these packing methods, trays are a great solution if you want to consolidate a number of works into a single crate. There's two orientations that you can pack trays, and that's front loading or top loading. Front loading is when the object is packed in the orientation that it would hang on the wall. And top loading is when the object is packed flat as though it were laying on a table. And usually you would want to pack an object flat if it was like an unframed work on paper or a pastel charcoal or graphite work. These generally should never ride in a front loading orientation because the vibration from transit can cause the media to fall off the face of the paper. Books and portfolios are generally written in top loading trays. So trays can be made from multiple materials, foam core cardboard, or for storage archival cardboard. And the pads are usually made of SFOAM, which is the white foam that we were talking about earlier and is good as a storage solution. I think we have illustrations of the front loading trays and top loading trays. So yeah, here we go, some illustrations. And so here what you're looking at are some front loading trays. And you can see here you have three artworks of different sizes, and the crate is not shown. But what you're looking at here too is these are the pads, and these pads sort of line up with each other so that the pressure in the crate is transferred through the pads rather than through the artworks. Essentially each tray is supported by the pads of the tray below rather than by the artwork that is sitting on the tray. Here are some top loading trays. Generally, we always suggest that you do a full perimeter border of foam on a top loading tray, and this will ensure that the artworks are sitting on, being supported by that foam rather than that pressure being transferred to the object on the tray below it. And so then sometimes you have a single object. Yeah, this is a case of when it's just one piece. Sometimes you might just have a single object in a crate. And so in that case you could use a tray, but you might not want to use that material. And so for transit you could pack that work directly into the crate, and for storage you could put it into an inner box, a box as a foam pad. This could be a storage solution as well. You take the inner box out of the crate. Yeah, if you take the inner box out of the crate that's fully lined with euphome or ester foam. And so sometimes you'll see objects will be riding directly against the euphome or ester foam, but you wouldn't want to store that object in that crate. Inner boxes like you see in this image here, they allow for the object to be held in place with ester foam pads while still having the benefit of a fully lined crate here. And so what you would do with this situation is that you would remove this box from this crate to store it so that you would avoid the off-gassing that would occur in that crate if you stored it with the box inside of it. So hand space. Yeah, I think of hand space as a good way to indicate to you where you want the work to be held, a good indicator. Yeah, like Lisa was mentioning earlier, you want to encourage safe handling. And one way to achieve this is by providing people with places to put their hands to handle the artwork. You can see here on this is an image of a top-looting tray, and there's this little finger hole cut out. And this just encourages someone instead of tilting the tray to get the artwork out or jamming their fingers in between the artwork and the foam to kind of safely handle it. And this is what you're looking at in this image of this crate here is you have the crate fully lined with foam and then pieces of foam or glued onto that full lining of foam with a void provided so that someone can fit their hands in there. And this is really important because you want to make sure that you've provided a place for someone to safely access the artwork. You don't want them to struggle to get it out of your packing solution. So just to go over travel frames a little bit more, because they are a very common object. They're made out of wood, but you can have a travel frame that has no lid. It can have a lid usually made with corrugated plastic like coroplast, or it might just have wooden slats on the face. And these are handling tools that allow the object to be moved around without directly touching the object itself. And usually objects are mounted into these travel frames with odds clips or cleats or T-brackets. One of the benefits of a travel frame is that the object can be wrapped inside of the travel frame. So if you wrap the travel frame in plastic, you don't actually have to directly contact the object itself with the plastic. So here's an image of a drawing diagram of an odds clip, which is a common hardware solution that you see. And they fold up so that you attach one side to your artwork. You usually use them in fours. So you attach one side to your artwork. You fold out the leg, and that leg is what gets attached to the travel frame. So the travel frame uses odds clips, and the box uses pads. Correct. So the biggest vocabulary lesson to take out of this is that a travel frame is a distinct object from a box. And so it's good to clarify these things. A lot of confusion can be avoided if you make it clear what you want done to your artwork. So whether you're building these objects yourself or you're asking a crater to build them, you should indicate what you want to use this object for. And I'm talking about a travel frame or inner box. Travel frames are called various things throughout the industry. I've encountered them being called handling frames or traveling boxes. We call them travel frames at our company, and that's kind of common in New York. But the most important thing to indicate would be that you want to mount your object into this frame using odds clips or cleats. So shadow boxes, they're a good sort of soft-packing alternative to a travel frame. If you don't have a shop, like a wood shop, this is a kind of easy way to protect an object that has a protrusion or sensitive surface. You can use hand tools to make them. And these can be packed on trays or inboxes or in crates. Exactly. So you basically, this would also be a handling tool that you can use. So instead of directly touching the artwork, you now can wrap the shadow box. You can pack the shadow box onto the tray. So now we're going to move into three-dimensional objects, which of course all objects are three-dimensional objects. Yeah, what do you mean by three-dimensional object? We generally, this is something that we kind of try to make a distinction between flatworks and 3D objects. It's really just vocabulary. But what we consider a three-dimensional object or sculpture is something that kind of exists in the round that is generally not hung on a wall, although obviously with contemporary art there are a lot of exceptions to these rules. But these are generally more complex objects that require more complex packing solutions. So what you're looking at on the slide is an image of a crate that has an inner box that has a sculpture inside of it. Just really basic overview. There are some typical types of packing that are used for sculpture. You have simple pad packing. You have cavity packing. And you have brace packing. Maybe in the next slide there's simple pad packing for sculpture. Maybe you've seen a crate like this where the object just slides in or out. It's a single object. There are no other parts except for the pad glued straight into the crate. Correct. And so this is something that you could do if your object had a generally sort of regular surface, sort of like a cube where you don't have big voids that need to be supported. The reason you can just use pads in this situation is because those pads are going to have a relatively low profile, meaning they don't have to be 16 inches deep to hit the artwork. In general, your pads are going to be made out of ethoprome. And they will have some kind of interweaving material applied to the surface, such as Tyvek or Velara. That's not always the case. Some people will simply wrap their object rather than wrap the pads. And a lot of it just depends on maybe your institution's preferences, the character of your artwork itself. So some artworks you don't want to wrap in plastic because maybe they have fragile surfaces that the plastic could pull on. But this would be a common treatment for pads, would be to wrap the pads themselves. So the next type of very common sculpture packing that you see is brace packing. And what you're looking at in this not terribly great photograph is a bronze figure, a life-size statue. I've blacked it out for privacy sake. But what you're looking at is it's being held down and in place with wooden braces that have pads attached to them. The braces are kind of like what I like to think of as like a kitchen drawer where it goes in and out. So it's sliding in at this place. And so you can have a couple types of braces. They could be tracked in, so they have tracks that they slide on like Lisa was saying. Or they could be screwed in, which is also really common. If you have an object that's going to be traveling a bunch of times in the same crate, the black braces are a really great way to ensure that it gets packed the same exact way every time. Because when you screw a brace in, the screw holds bore out. It's really up to the person who's reinstalling it to put it in the correct place. So there's more places for error change in the packing. You want to use this kind of packing if your object kind of has a irregular shape or delicate surface. One thing that is a benefit with brace packing is that you can touch the object as little as possible. So you can kind of hold it in place as though you were holding an object in place with your fingers as opposed to grabbing it with your hands. And this is ideal. You want it in general default to a packing method that involves touching the artwork as little as possible. Every time you touch an artwork, it shortens its lifespan. Every time you handle an artwork, it shortens its lifespan. So with good packing, you want to make sure that you are interacting with the surface as little as possible. You want to always choose areas that are the safest place to touch it. So if you have an area that is made up of very fragile fibers, for example, you wouldn't hold that down there. You would try to hold it down by the bronze area. You want to make sure if your piece has, if there's an alternative to holding it on its surface, for example, if your piece has mounting hardware. That's a great way to hold your object in place while basically minimizing contacting the surface of the piece. And so what I'm talking about with mounting hardware is if you have an object that screws onto a pedestal, something like that, you can often use those mounting holes to hold the object in place. It wouldn't be the only way that you held the object in place necessarily, but it could provide a lot of that stability in the crate. In this slide, you have a pad at the top, and that's because you're basically trying to approach the sculpture so it doesn't spin. It doesn't really move. You want to make sure that you're holding this object down so it's not, it can't jump up and then side to side in front and back. And here you can see that this object is a female figure. It's being held down by her shoulders and then on her head. And then it's being held side to side on the hips and on the legs. And then, probably not very visible here, but she's got pads all around holding her feet in place. Just to go to talking about handling a little bit, sometimes you have an object that's very, very heavy or very, very fragile. And you don't really want to touch it directly too much. And when it's very heavy, one of the reasons might be that it's heavy, but it's not big enough to have the number of people hold it at the same time. That's necessary to lift its weight. Well, here again, the sculpture tray could be a good way to encourage safe handling. Yeah, so a sculpture tray is basically, it's a plank of wood, usually MDO. Sometimes it'll have interleaving material attached to it like HDPE, which is a rigid plastic. HDPE obviously comes in many forms. It comes in sheeting, but it comes in a board basically that you can use. And you put the object as seen in this image on the left. You put the object on the tray and then you lift the tray. And this way you avoid overhandling the object, and it can just also provide structures if you needed to forklift or pallet jack the object into the crate. Could this be a storage solution as well? Yeah. I mean, this is really common where people will have their object packed a lot on the sculpture tray. So a lot of the packing will have been done on the tray. Your braces will be screwed down to the tray. And then the tray will be removed from the crate for storage. You know, the object might be draped with plastic or something, but it promotes kind of a storage and handling solution. That can be a really easy way to move the object around. Just to reiterate with braces, braces can be screwed or tracked in, which means tracks are basically you've provided, like this was saying like a kitchen drawer, you've provided a track for it to run so that it will always go back in the same place. If you're screwing in your braces, it's a good idea to clearly mark where those braces go so that the person on the other end, when they are repacking your object, doesn't have to make a lot of decisions because you want to read control of the decisions that you're making with packing. To be really clear, something that you see a lot with bad packing is someone is using a brace pack method, but they're allowing the wood of the brace to directly touch the object, and you should never do that. You always want a pad to be in between the wood and the object. I know this sounds very intuitive, but it is surprisingly not. You don't want a piece of wood up against your art object or whatever type of object you're packing. So always make sure that you have an interleaving material in between the wood and your object, and usually that's going to be ester foam, although it could be Velara on top of ester foam depending on the characteristics of your object. And then one thing that you might want to watch out for is burnishing, which happens when a pad basically shines up a little area of your artwork. Usually it happens on stone or bronze, and this can be avoided if you drape your artwork in a material like soft Tyvek or Darteq, and then rack your pads as well in a material like Tyvek tape or plastic, something like that. Another very, very common packing method that you will see is cavity packing. And cavity packing is a great solution for very fragile objects. Yeah, I have handled some baskets that were really fragile that cavity packing was perfect for or for really fragile masks, something that maybe can't stand on its own that needs just a nice place to rest, or maybe something really fragile like glass or ceramics. So cavity packing is really great for that. Yeah, and this would be an alternative to like tissue packing, something. What you do basically is usually using ester foam or ufoam, you would cut the contour of the shape out of that foam, and we have a video up, actually we have a couple videos up on that link that show a cavity pack being done. The foam is cut out to contour the shape of the object, and I know that previously I said with brief packing, you want to touch the object as little as possible, but sometimes it's just not feasible. What a cavity pack does in a situation is instead of providing a point of pressure to hold an object in place, it disperses that pressure throughout the cavity, and this can be a good way to minimize shock that, for example, a glass object would experience if the crate experienced shock. The foam absorbs the shock, yeah, it lessens the shock. And here's an image of this piece is not particularly fragile, it's a marble bust of a person, but like Lisa was saying, it couldn't stand on its own, so if you tried to stand this up on the table, it would just flop over. And because of the carving, you don't want to see that happen. So the best way we could figure to pack something like this was in a cavity where it's supported from underneath, and it's not, you know, it could have had a brace pack as well, but this is just a kind of simpler method of doing that, and because it's stone which can shatter in certain circumstances, the cavity provides shock protection against that. Here, again, my favorite safe handling of objects. The hand spaces are like indicators to help the person on the other end that's unpacking and handling the art to know the best areas to actually touch the work. The less, the least fragile or where the surface is like easier to handle. Yeah, and so I mean that's a really good point where just to reiterate, you want to really lead people to how you want them to touch your art. You want to give them very few chances to be creative. You want them to kind of follow your direction, and if you're not going to be there to tell them verbally how to touch something, you can give them indications. And so providing hand space is a great way to show someone how they should handle your object. As an aside, you can line a cavity in, usually Soft Tyvek is a preferred material, although some institutions don't like it because it has a surface texture, which in some circumstances could transfer to an object, although it's a very common material. So some people use muslin instead, or Teflon is another material. And I see a question about adhesive here in the parking lot that I'm just going to address really quick, although we are going to answer all these questions after the webinar is over. But generally, the adhesives that are used to attach pads to wood is a hot melt glue. 3M makes a hot melt glue that is considered archival to past body tests. So that would be, I would suggest going through Trim's website and taking a look at their hot melt adhesive. And wrapping a pad in material, you can use glue again to wrap the pad. It takes a little practice and can be quite frustrating, but it's definitely doable. And some have adhesive. Yeah, I believe that through university products you can find self-adhesive Tyvek tapes. Well, what's a cavity package slide? It's something like this. Did you use it for storage? You know, yes and no. You're obviously using ester foam, which is not great. So it depends on the composition of your object. I would say for most ceramic and glass, you're probably not as concerned about off-gassing as you would be with a painting, for example. But again, you really have to kind of think about the materials that you're packing, meaning the art materials. So as an alternative, you could soft-pack this maybe using archival tissue or even pillows made with batting, something like that. So one thing that I'd just like to remind people is that there is more than one way to pack a crate. And so even though there are standard methods for packing, you shouldn't feel constrained to only use one. Every object is unique. And so you may have a situation where the bottom half of your object really requires a cavity pack, but the top is a completely fragile, with little spindly things that are sticking off, and it would really require a brief pack. So you can do both. You should be open to mixing solutions where it's appropriate. And just keep in mind there's no one-side-size-fits-all approach to packing, especially when you're dealing with art objects. Every object is unique, and you should approach it as such. Think outside the box. So a box can be open from the top and the side or the front. That's correct. So that's what you're seeing in this drawing here. And the reason that you might want that is because, for example, here you have this object being cavity-packed. These are layers of foam. So it's being cavity-packed on the bottom and then brace-packed on the top. And it's basically top-loading, but you want to be able to access and see what you're doing. So it's also front-loading. And so you should really think about how you want someone to access your object. And generally, you don't want someone to have to reach into any packing solution in an awkward way. You want it to be comfortable to lift out of the box. And so for a top-loading box, that would mean you don't want to make it too deep. And for a front-loading box, again, you wouldn't want to make it too deep. So whatever orientation the lid or front of the box, whatever it comes off, it should really encourage someone to be able to get that object out of the container easily. So a top-loading box could be loaded in a front-loading crate. So that's definitely something that you can do. So let's say you had multiple objects going into top-loading boxes. You could put those top-loading boxes into a front-loading crate, and that might allow you to put more boxes in the same crate. It's good to just kind of think about these things that there isn't just one approach to mixing orientations with your inner components and your outer components. That's acceptable as long as it's safe, meaning that you don't have to do any sort of weird movement to get the object out of the crate. You want to minimize that. You want to make it easy to remove the object or the inner component of the inner box or travel for it. You want to make it easy to remove that object out of the crate. So soft packing, which in our experience is sort of a mixed bag in a lot of ways. I think Lisa and I both have a lot of experience unpacking soft-packed objects. But generally soft-packing refers to when you pack an object maybe using tissue or bubble for short-term transit solutions. It's very common to think about how you would move something from your storage facility to your museum. You might just pack it in tissue in a cardboard box and bring it over on the truck. Soft-packing really can be a place where some bad things happen, though. Well, things can get lost if it's not labeled properly or not really being sure of how many pieces are... If it's not labeled, you might not know how many pieces are in the box. You might have a piece wrapped in tissue that you can't see because you've wadded so much tissue into that box that it's not clear what's the object and what's the packing material. These are all really common concerns with soft-packing. I think the biggest issue that you see with soft-packing is objects getting lost in the packing material and then being mishandled because the soft-packing was not labeled clearly. And when we're talking about labeling, you want to label it so that, again, you're encouraging good handling. So if it must always ride in a vertical orientation, you should definitely write that on your soft-packing, even if you're only putting it into storage. You don't know who's going to encounter your object next and what their impulse is going to be when they see this object. They might not stop to say, hey, how do I handle this? So you should tell them through clear labeling or stickers that go on it with arrows or whatnot. I even think it's a good idea to, if it's going to travel to different locations, not to throw away the materials because sometimes people, when they're unpacking soft-pack, they might just kind of toss the packing materials. It's important to even let them know to keep it all together. Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point because you see that happen a lot where people have soft-packed works for transit and somebody throws away the archival tissue and then the person repacking it just repacks it without the archival tissue. It's a problem. I think, speaking of archival tissue, that one other really common place for damage in soft-packing is people threading material through the void in their object. And so what I'm talking about is imagine a jug that has a handle. That handle, you would never lift that jug from that handle as an art handler because it's probably the weakest part of that object. And just in the same way, you would never put packing materials through that handle because it may cause someone to pull the packing material and put pressure on that thing. So you see this a lot when people are packing jugs with handles, glassware, and then often with chandeliers, people will thread material through the chandelier in a way that encourages them to sort of pull the material, the chandelier off. So what you want to do in this situation is really wrap things in a clear way without threading things through. So you can stabilize the object without threading material through it. There's something else to add. If you're soft-packing for storage, you might want to avoid using tape as much as possible. Yeah, tapes in general, the adhesive on tapes break down and you see two things happening generally. Either the adhesive on the tape drives out and your tape no longer sticks to the surface of whatever it's taping. Or it breaks down and it becomes super sticky and the adhesive will stay on your packing material when you remove the tape. And both of these indicate a chemical change in that adhesive, which could be affecting the environment of your storage container. Just as an aside, a really common place for damage is people using tape in a soft-packing situation and accidentally, because of all the material that they're using, tape gets on the surface of the object. So that's something to be aware of and to avoid. And just again, clear labeling. Label the number of objects that is in your soft-packing solution. So if you have a cardboard box with 32 objects in it, that should definitely be written somewhere on that box that there are 32 objects in that box. So we've talked a lot about the interior packing of crates. And so I'm just going to do a really, really brief overview of sort of the exterior crates. So this diagram, which shows sort of a cross-section of a crate where you see the rain cap and that's basically you want a piece of wood flat on the top of your crate. And what that does is, like its name suggests, is if your crate happens to be an inclement weather, it could even be for a brief period of time. You don't want rainwater or snow or whatever pooling on the surface of your crate. And so a rain cap basically encourages the water to shed off the top of the crate. End blocks provide structure to the crate, so your crate should have that. It basically protects it from impact. And if you talked about a J-bar or a pallet jack or a forklift blade, which you may not want your crate to be forklifted, but again, unfortunately, if you're not with your crate in a courier capacity, it's likely that it will be at the airport. Handles encourage people to use the handles as opposed to tilting the crate in an awkward way. Especially if your crate is heavy, this is really important. Your handles can be made out of metal, or it can be a piece of wood, which is very common. And then gasket, which is another protection against inclement weather. Like the gasket that you might see around your windows in your house to prevent moisture from getting in. This is the same kind of thing. It's a rubberized gasket that provides a seal that prevents moisture from getting into the crate. So this is obviously a crate for transit. What's the difference between a crate for transit and a crate for storage? Well, the first thing is that you wouldn't need a rain cap, because hopefully your storage solution is not going to have a lot of water flowing everywhere. And then in terms of end blocks and skids, you might not need those either, because you could probably have an inner box as opposed to a crate. So it's a much simpler construction that doesn't require the reinforcement of these elements to protect the structure. Because one thing to remember with a crate for transit is that it's going to be moved around a lot. So it's not just like a piece of furniture where it just sits there. Like this is something that gets tilted and moved and put on dollies. And so you want it to really, really have a strong structure that will hold together during all these things. For an inner box, you don't really require that as much, because it's not going to face as much handling in the same way. So we're just going to kind of finish up with a couple of issues to consider, and then some recommendations. So this is really common. It's my favorite. Common, maybe not super common, but it happens. And when it happens, it is so upsetting. But you always want to make sure that your crate is going to sit through the doorway or into the elevator of the place that it's going to. It's the worst where you build a crate for an object, and it is too tall to sit in the institution's door or too wide to sit in your elevator. And it's a real pickle for the art handlers on the other end, and no one's happy when that happens to you. So those are questions that you want to ask. Do you have a loading dock? How tall is your door, or how wide is your door? What are the internal dimensions of an elevator that if the crate has to ride on a freight elevator, for example? And always be available to give that information to if you're hiring somebody to do something for you. They might not ask, so go ahead and measure out your doorway, your elevators, and have it sitting by your computer. Yeah, I think if you're responsible for creating specifications for creating for your institution, that's a really good thing to have on hand, that you can just have a little packet where you say, I want my crates 100% of the time if they're traveling to be lined in ester foam. Our loading dock is 92 inches tall, so we have a height restriction of 92 inches on all crates, et cetera, et cetera. One other really common thing that you see, and when I say common, meaning common among the rare problems, is tip risks. So crates that are really tall and skinny, they are more likely to fall over. That's pretty obvious when you think about it. One of the ways that you can counter this is by creating a minimum footprint. So, for example, we would suggest that any crate over 60 inches be at least 12 inches wide, 12 to 15 inches wide. When you have a crate that's under a certain width, it gets real sloppy and it's prone to tip over, especially when somebody tries to put it onto a dial. Another thing to consider that people often don't think about is how heavy is your crate? If it's really, really heavy, it might require one sort of a different construction plan for the crate itself, but also you might want to provide a way to handle it like it should have a place for forklift blades so that it can be forklifted, or you might want to stencil the crate that's very, very heavy. So that basically it protects the people who are going to be handling the crate, but it also protects your object from having people frustrated and trying to lift something that they can't lift. So we'll just finish out with some recommendations. This is something that we do all the time. We like to record our successful packing solutions and our unsuccessful ones. But, you know, you might encounter the same object 10 times and pack it differently every time, and it might only be until the 10th time that you really arrive at the best solution. There's no one answer to a lot of this stuff. So it's really important that you keep track of what works and what doesn't. You should really focus on clear communication in the form of clear packing instructions or diagrams. I always say this, but I like to imagine the least experienced user, and that's my kind way of saying you might have someone who you don't really want handling your art, handling your art. So give them as much information as possible so that you are, even if you're not there, you are effectively telling them how to treat your art. I think one thing to think about is you should always be open to new approaches to packing your object. You know, there are new materials and methods that are constantly being talked about, and some of them are very good solutions. But you should always put the safety of your object first. You know, you shouldn't really experiment with your objects if you're not sure that it's going to work. And then we always say you shouldn't store your objects in crates that are fully lined with thermal insulating foam. That's just a general rule. Offgassing really does damage and affect an object. And then, you know, I think the biggest thing is talk through your object, ask questions. What is it made out of? What kind of, you know, what kind of material would be best to work with this object? Every object is unique, and you should treat it accordingly. You know, don't just take a cookie cutter approach to packing. Really think about each object as it's presented to you, even if you're dealing with a lot of similar objects. And so I think that's our hour. And so I'm going to go through some of the questions that are up here that we use here. So what about polyethylene foam? Polyethylene foam is actually just ethyl foam. So that's the white foam that I was talking about. There's a couple poles that are being put up right now. We're just kind of interested to see what everybody is mostly concerned with here. And it looks pretty even so far. Yeah. They've got support and storage. So the second question here is, please comment on the different grades of ethyl foam. So just in general, I'm just going to put out there that there's a great organization that talks about materials. It's called PAKIN, P-A-C-C-I-N. It's Preparation Art Handling Collection Care Information Network. And they have a really nice materials index. Just something that you could access later. I'm just throwing that out there as a resource. But to talk about ethyl foam, I know white ethyl foam has no colors. There's black ethyl foam as well, which I believe is past auto tests. But a general rule of thumb with plastics, like polyethylene foam or coroplasts, is that it's more likely to pass auto tests if it doesn't have a coloring agent in it. So generally, you're going to want to use the white ethyl foam. Another distinction of ethyl foam is densities of ethyl foam. So you will hear 4.0, 2.2, 9.0. These are all different densities that can handle a different weight rating. Which foam would be used for storage? So again, ethyl foam or the polyethylene foam is what you would want to use in a storage crate. And you would want to avoid using the u-foam or ester foam, which are urethane foams. And they're the gray foams. Or the polystyrene foam, which is the kind of foam that you see at home depot to line your house for insulation. That foam also you would want to avoid to use in a storage crate. So the next question here is, if I have a crate that used to hold three paintings, so I want to use it for only one of the three for an outgoing one, what should I be worried about when we're retrofitting? Well, the first thing that you're going to want to worry about is holding your object in place. You want to make sure that whatever pads are in that crate hold that object so that it's not moving and there's no extra space around it. A good way to do this would be to make a tray out of cardboard or foam core and put pads on it that build up the difference of the missing artworks. But you want to make sure that your object is also held in place so that side to side and top to bottom it's still held in place in the crate. But basically making a dummy tray is a good way to fill out that extra space. And when retrofitting, be sure to let the handler on the other end know that there's only one object and not two that randomly disappear. Yeah, you don't want to give them a heart attack. That's just a courtesy. The next question, how can I package ship multi-panel acrylic paintings on two-inch cradles clayboards? The panels are unframed with no hanging hardware. So this is a really kind of difficult situation. A shadow box actually would be a really good solution in this situation. And that would probably be the safest way. And I guess you could wrap the pads with Tyvek. Yeah, depending on if you could touch the space of it, you might want to use, say, SFOAM wrapped in Tyvek or maybe wrapped in Dar-Tec or Alara, something like that. It's a way to hold it down in the shadow box, which you can see in the video. Actually, one of the videos we have shows a shadow box being used that way. How can – oh, sorry. So is polystyrene chemically safe for objects? Well, I think for a short-term solution it is. I've read conflicting opinions on this. I think it offgases and it produces dust. So, you know, when you punch a piece of styrofoam or a polystyrene foam, it actually breaks down. It doesn't recover, which is an argument against using it. Because basically, when it experiences impact, it doesn't return. It just breaks. So with UFOAM or esterfoam, if you punch that UFOAM, it returns like a mattress. So – but in terms of its chemical composition, I think it should be treated like esterfoam or UFOAM as a material that you wouldn't want to store an object around for more than 90 days. And I would be really hesitant to have it contact an object directly to be perfectly honest. Would coloring and artwork also be the same as using a shadow box? Yep, that's exactly the same thing. How do you attach the tyvek to the pad? Well, you can wrap it like a present. You can wrap it like a present or you can use a self-adhesive tyvek tape, which I believe is sold on university projects. Often when you wrap a pad, we might make a little incision on the back and tuck it in. So then when you glue the pad onto the crate or onto the cardboard, it's also touching the tyvek two-foot offset in place for the duration of the travel. Yeah. So could you use esterfoam for cavity packing and then have the pack for long-term storage? You could – I would suggest only if the objects were sort of heavy and robust. I've done it before for different clients. The thing with esterfoam or eufoam is that it's a real cushion. So if you were going to use esterfoam as a cavity, you would just have to be aware that it's a much more rigid foam, and so it's not going to provide that cushioning. As an alternative, I would suggest using sort of like making pillows or something like that, which you could also use for lining your esterfoam cavity with polybatting lined with muslin or tyvek, something like that. So what material – oh wait, what kind of adhesives are you using to attach esterfoam? So I think I want to read this a little bit in a webinar, but we use a hot milk glue. That's a stable material that we would recommend. And then what materials do you suggest for the rain caps? This should just be a plywood. We use MDO, but any plywood would work. It's better if it has sort of the facing on it, which is a sort of waterproof facing. So, you know, with pilots you can see those ones that sort of are composite boards or you can see on the surface it's a composite board. That might not be the best material for a rain cap. You probably want one that has like a smooth surface that has a sort of waterproofing. Also, painting can make it waterproof a bit as well like a poly or paint can help. Right, so often people will paint their crates for two reasons. It provides a little bit of weatherproofing, but it also makes your crate really easy to identify in a warehouse or in an airport tarmac situation, which could be very important if you were shipping something of high value. So what do you use for the gasket? We use a rubberized gasket. It's basically the kind of gasket that you might line your window with for a moisture barrier. I will look more into the specifics of that, but you can usually get this at hardware stores if you're in a pinch, or I'm not sure. Steve? I used to do a very special rubber and I think it's Jacob's and Jacob's. Oh, Jacob's and Jacob's is our distributor for that gasket. Sorry, I was phoning in for some help from our very good co-worker. What about insurance for transit? Well, that's a big thing. It depends on your institution. So your insurance should generally be carried through your institution, or it's possible that, for example, if you are borrowing a piece, maybe the lender will be paying for that part of the process, but that's really dependent institution to institution, and sometimes you can purchase insurance through your creating company, but that's all dependent on your own situation. And so you really have what type of 3M hot melt passes the audio test? Are there other adhesives you recommend for inside crates and cases? Well, the 3M hot melt that passes the audio test is actually listed on the Conservation Wikia that has the audio test materials. Unfortunately, I don't know it off the top of my head, but because it's a basic... It's one of their big sellers. It's for the industrial 3M large orange glue guns. I will try to enter that information later if I figure it out. The product number is 3292Q on the 3M website that we use, which we have certified has passed audio tests. Another material that you can use inside crates would be a spray glue called Somolsa, which is something that you spray on using matacoses, and that also is acceptable. So what you're talking about here is a polyethylene synfoam. Oh, you're probably talking about microphone. Let me click the link. I'm afraid to click the link because I don't want to interrupt this. I'm pretty sure that what you're talking about is microphone. And that also is... Basically, it's at the phone that's just in a thinner form, and people use it a lot as a soft-packing material. So that would be the same material, and also it's fine. So I work for a transportation museum, and many of the items we have to pack for storage in shipping have oil or other viscous fluids inside of them. It's not always possible, advisable, to fully drain and clean them. Any recommendations for protecting the crate itself or the things on the outside of the crate from seepage and leakage? That's a terrible problem. Well, it's also not that uncommon. One, the simplest thing to do would be to wrap the object itself in plastic and make sure that it's sealed. And then invest in maybe an inner box that is lined in plastic so that seepage doesn't affect the rest of the crate. And you'd want to kind of keep it separated by wrapping it in plastic or putting it in a plastic lined box, separate it so that it doesn't affect the phone in the crate. And so we just got the link up, and that is a microphone totally fine to use. It's basically just a different dimensional as a phone. And so another thing with any objects that have plastic liquids and stuff, you want to make sure when you're shipping that that it's safe to ship in terms of if it's a flammable material or something like that, you really don't want to get into a situation where you're putting the airline at risk or something by shipping something that could be combustible. So this question is, we have historic scientific instruments, sextants and quadrants. Were there original travel cases? Would you trust to packing the instruments in those cases, or would you advise packing instruments in cases separately? Well, it depends on how the internal packing in those boxes has held up. If it's still in relatively good shape, I would say that's fine. You could always kind of add to it with a little archival tissue if needed, but probably that's going to be a pretty safe solution. And also, because the box now is kind of like a flatwork, it's much easier to pack onto a tray so it can kind of speed up the packing. And also, the box provides a nice handling tool so that not too many people are handling the actual fragile object of a sextant or the quadrant. I'm concerned about the offgassing of plywood crates, any recommendations for an interior barrier lining? Yeah. There's a couple of types of moisture barriers that people use. Probably the most common one is Marble Seal and film. And this is something that you would line the inside of your crate lid and it acts. It's an aluminized plastic that you heat-activated material that you iron onto the inside of your crate and it protects the interior environment from offgassing. That's probably the most common one. You could line the interior of your crate with... Sometimes people might line it with a tie-back and stuff, but it's definitely not as effective. One thing that I would say with Marble Seal is be aware that when you puncture it, it's no longer effective. So if you're attaching pads to it, you don't want to cut away the film. A lot of people do so that the glue will adhere directly to the wood. You're going to want to glue right onto that marble seal. And just be aware that it's really easy to puncture or tear, but you can patch it. So basically, you just iron on patches, but it does require some upkeep and it is time-consuming and pretty expensive to apply to the interior of a crate. So if you were looking for a storage solution to avoid that, you might want to consider using a different material like making your box with coral-plastic walls or something like that just for storage, not for transit. Coral-plastic... I mean, that's a good question. I would say in terms of using it inside of a crate as a barrier, I'm not really sure. But I think that if you used it instead of the plywood, that would be probably a pretty good solution, which you could do by basically creating a frame out of wood and then lining the interior of that frame with the coral-plastic. And yeah, marble seal is really expensive and nobody likes to apply it. It's probably one of the least favorite materials of anybody who has to build a crate for objects because it's just very finicky and very time-consuming to apply. Looks like all the questions for now. So I mean, I guess we can stick around for a little bit if people have any more questions. Here's one on DARTech. There are a couple more coming up. Okay. You have a couple more coming up. Yeah. On Sarah Dunn, I put in a link to our webinar that we did last spring on care of industrial objects because there was some discussion about moving them, putting them into storage. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing that you always want to be aware of with those types of objects is that, you know, that moving them obviously can cause seepage and spillage of those materials. But you also want to be aware of whether those materials are toxic for the environment, whether you segregate them from your other objects in your collection, and whether you need to maybe inform, you know, the fire department that you might have climable objects somewhere in your facility, just as a little side by note. There are rigging companies that specialize in moving industrial objects from museums, and I think some of them are listed in that webinar's handout. So here's another question. Have you ever seen DARTech leave a white powder residue on an object? We had this come up on the frame of a painting throughout the DARTech and cavity packed to a flat. I'm not sure if the white substance came from the DARTech abrading or if it could be something from the wool. It easily brushed off, but just wondering if you had ever seen this. I have not, actually. I haven't seen that. But how long was it left in the cavity pack? Because it could be an issue with off-gassing affecting the object inside of the DARTech. I have seen objects that were left wrapped in plastic inside fully lined crates lined with ester foam, and they were left in there for two years. And basically the varnish on the frame became sticky and viscous, and that was from the off-gassing in the crate. But I would say that it sounds more like it could be from the... I mean, DARTech is very smooth, so generally I would say that it wouldn't abrade anything. That's almost its selling point. It's a very smooth material that provides few hard corners or resistance at the surface. So I would say that probably it sounds more like maybe an off-gassing issue, but I'm not sure. So here I'm already using original travel boxes for science equipment. I made a personal purchase of secondhand microscope equipment that was shipped in its original travel boxes. The rigid green foam that was originally used to support and protect the equipment disintegrated from vibration and shock during transit. And I received loose objects covered in cream powder. Oh, it's terrible. But yes, I mean a lot of foams, as they age, they basically, they were powderized. And it's something to consider. One thing I suggest to anybody who has to deal with traveling art is that be aware of how long your object is, how old your foam and your crate is. For example, with ester foam, after ten years, the thermal, the R rating of the foam goes down. So changes happen over time. So I've painted foam powderized for very years. A lot of it has to do with the additives in the foam, the colors. What material do you recommend to go directly over touching the surface of acrylic painting before packing? In unframed paintings, I would generally say that you shouldn't touch the face of the painting with any material. You would want to use like a shadow box or a travel frame if it's unframed. If it's framed but unglazed, same thing. But if you do have to touch the face of a painting, I mean it's really not something that I would suggest. So I would suggest doing a shadow box and then wrapping that. But dart tech is a good material for that. I think you want to make sure that that material is not touching on the face of the piece because it could adhere. And one thing I want to say really quick is probably one of the worst damage I've seen from people wrapping paintings is when people use glassing to wrap paintings. Glassing will adhere to the face of the painting and it happens really quickly. So don't wrap any paintings in glassing. It's just the wrong material for that. It was originally made for paperworks to act as interweaving material in between paperworks. And it really should be used for anything else. A shadow box is the same thing as coloring. Yes, a shadow box is the same thing as coloring. And that's one of the things that I'm going to just suggest really quickly is that when you're working with your crater or with another institution and you're talking about your creating specifications or packing specifications, be aware that vocabulary is inconsistent throughout the industry. And so you should really describe what you're talking about. Really work to establish a common vocabulary with the people you're working with because there could be a lot of misunderstandings that arise over somebody's definition of a box, for example, or a crate. For example, we call the boxes that go inside of crates. We call those inner boxes. Some people call those inner crates. It can be a point of real confusion. And sometimes some bad mistakes can happen when the wrong kind of component just builds. And again, we have a small little video of shadow box being created or coloring being created. I can give you some ideas on possibly how to construct something like that. And also there for download is a little handout that we put together, and it has a lot of the information that are on the slides. And it goes over a couple of other things, but all of the definitions that we talked about in terms of what certain types of packing are are in that handout. So I would suggest if you're interested in kind of going over it, you know, put that out and take a look at it. Okay. Just two quick questions. Please fill out the evaluations. I will consult with Meg and Lisa, and we can put together a supply list that I'll post with the handouts and the recording and the PowerPoint slides, and that will be done in the next few days. Mary calls to ask, do you have patterns for shadow boxes and trays to share? And, yeah, I think take a look at the videos, right? Yeah, I think, you know, I don't have specific patterns to share, but it's pretty simple. I have a handout, actually, that I made a couple of years ago for a very, it was called Getting Basic with Your Art, which was a workshop for artists to teach artists how to pack their art, not so terribly, because artists are notoriously awful at packing their art, and they do say this. No, thank you. No, thank you. I absolutely make art to be packed now. I'm like, if I have a crate that I can refurbish, I'll make art to be packed. But basically, I'll provide that link for Susan, and she can maybe put it up, but it has a little description of how to make a shadow box in terms of how to construct it. Great. I see also here the Silicon Relief. Yeah, so Silicon Relief, yeah, I have worked with it, you know, generally where I've used it is when you're packing something that maybe is still, the media is still active, like a painting. But it's also good for oil, you know, like oil drawings, when people use oil sticks. The thing with Silicon Relief paper, and anytime, if you did have to put, like for example, if you did have to put an acrylic painting and you had to wrap it directly, you might want to put Silicon Relief paper around it, because the Silicon Relief paper will not stick to it. You have to get special tape for Silicon Relief paper, or you have to just basically pressure wrap it so that you're not, you know, maybe wrap around the Silicon Relief paper with plastic or dart tech to hold it in place, because nothing sticks to Silicon Relief paper, except the special tape that's very expensive. Okay, I think that's it. Great. Thank you both so much. This is a great way to close out the year. And we hope that everybody has nice holidays, and check the website, because the schedule is ever-changing right now, so be attentive to that, and we'll see you in the new year. Thank you, Lisa and Meg. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Mike.