 Susan Barger on behalf of the FAIC, go ahead Susan. Hi everyone, how are you? This is going to be a really neat webinar, so I'm glad you're all here and I expect we'll have more people. I just want to remind you, if you have any questions, you can post them about Turn for your collection. You can post them in the discussion forum at our website. You need to register, but that's only to keep spam away. We also have an announcement list, and it's only for announcements, it's not a discussion list, so if you'd like to join now, this is the address to do that. People that have been here before know that we do closed captions after webinars because they're better quality, and I just wanted to let you know that all of the webinars to the last webinar are now have closed captions, and so if you see either the closed caption symbol or for closed captions, please access via this link. It will take you to the ARC YouTube channel and you can turn on closed captions, so that's available. We also have where I'm Facebook and we're on Twitter, you can join us there. You can always contact me, this is my email address, and I'm happy to hear from you. Our next webinar in two weeks is about emergency recovery vendors and getting ready for emergencies before they happen, and then on May 1st we're going to do a Twitter chat with Preventive Conservation with our friends from ARCs, and it's going to be part of their regular ARCs chat, so you can tune in there, and then in May we're going to do a webinar on care of globes, so we look forward to seeing you many more times, and now I'm going to turn this over to Clara Deck, who's there you go. Okay, and for everyone I will be paying attention to the questions, and I will make sure that they get copied and we'll answer them later in the webinar, and anything that doesn't get answered, Clara said she will write answers too, and I will post them with the recording and handouts and everything, so let's get going. Great, thank you Susan. So yes, my name is Clara Deck, and I'm Senior Conservator at the Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, where spring has finally sprung. We are opening our Greenfield Village tomorrow, so it's a kind of a crazy time here. I've been here for 27 years working with many allied professionals inside my institution and outside, and I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm really just going to have to scratch the surface, because industrial technology is complex and the issues of dealing with it tend to be complex as well. I'm trying to give museums with less resources some confidence in dealing with what they've got, but I've also got a lot of information on just how much effort and skills are required to do some of the, you know, to get big things going. So let's move ahead. What is an industrial artifact after all? Surely operational locomotives would be considered industrial. Even static displays, if you're lucky to have a historic train on display, that's definitely an industrial artifact. What about electrical power distribution equipment? That's probably an industrial artifact. It's actually, you know, introduced the industrial revolution in America for sure. It is, this is a huge power generator. I'm keeping up. What about things that make other things? That's probably an industrial artifact. This is a machine that made light bulbs. Many municipalities also have trains on poles, trains, planes on poles in parks. That's probably on the edge of what an industrial artifact is. Certainly some municipalities like mine are preserving their industrial heritage in one way or another. Usually things end up looking a little bit rusty. What about airplanes? Is that an industrial object that is kind of a category onto itself, but it was a mass-produced artifact? So our tower clocks. This is the clock that's in our museum here in Dearborn. It's been tick-talking for, since 1929, operating four giant dials on the outside of our clock tower. What about a prototype house of the future? This is an aluminum house that hangs on a steel pole. Is that an industrial object? Probably. Certainly mass-produced cars, even if only in small amounts. Tractors and all kinds of agricultural equipment. What about race cars? What about rare one-offs? Or maybe two of them might have been made at the time? How about the products that include film technology, communication equipment? Is that an industrial object? It is made at mass-produced with reproducible parts. Probably. This is a very early object, but multiples were made. It's got hard rubber for the handle. It's got a wooden case, hard rubber, nickel-plated metal. Is that an industrial object? What about mechanical musical contraptions like this? This is operational. It's a violano virtuoso. It uses a paper roll run by solenoid switches that run both a violin and a piano at the same time. It makes a humongous racket. I'm about to play with one later in the summer to operate it for Maker's Fair. Here's where I'm going to ask you to do the next poll. What type of museum are you? We are founded, as you can see, by Henry Ford here, his buddy Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. I'm going to ask participants, as I guess we can't really have them both on the screen at the same time, but I'm curious to know what kind of museum you are. I've noticed as people sign up that many of you are from museums that I've either visited or I'm familiar with, and I have to say many of you are at museums that I've been dying to visit for quite a while, including colleagues I've spoken to over the phone. So science and technology seems to be big. Maybe our list is long. General history. So, you know, our Henry Ford Museum, we could be calling ourselves the General History Museum because we have a whole greenfield village of 80 separate historic sites, including the Wright Brothers Cycle Shop where they developed the airplane and Edison's Menlo Park Lab, but we have an eight acre museum as well. So we're an indoor outdoor museum, and maybe some of you guys might be considered that too. You might have some collections outdoors that might be there to kind of attract your visitors, but very few of you are actually specialized museums, I guess, right? So that's interesting too. And very few of you are private collectors. I have spoken over the phone and to people over the years, private collectors, guys who collect traction engines and all kinds of other stuff, and I'm always interested to learn what they know and what they don't know because we like to share our knowledge as much as possible and give them practical advice as well. So I do like to know that there's some people from private collections. So has everybody had a chance, Susan? Yeah, looks pretty good. Okay, so that's interesting. So a little bit more about us then. We are, as you know, founded by Henry Ford, who even as soon as he made money, he wanted to collect historic objects. Ironically, he was collecting objects from agricultural history quite a bit. This is the very engine that lured him off the farm, that he saw coming down towards his father's farm that came with the Threshing crew. It made noise. It had movement. He was intrigued by it. He was already interested in clocks and watches, and this led him on his career to be the mechanical engineering genius that he turned out to be. He collected it in 1913, and he hung on to it for many years. We call it his rosebud. It's still on exhibit in the museum today. Simultaneously, he was collecting trained carloads of machine tools from all over America and actually some from Britain. He had agents looking everywhere. These machine tools lined up out here on a platform would have been used in up to three or four separate machine jobs in Greenfield Village, and they would have been used to restore the machines that ended up in the museum. He was building the museum simultaneously. This is a huge British engine. There's rumors around here that the museum was built around the machines. You can say that the floor was built around the machines because some of them had to be set into foundations, but this would have been the other side of the museum as late as 1934, even though he had officially opened in 1929. This huge eight-acre teak floor was open and waiting for business. Here the machine's still being set into the floor, and this was his idea of a perfect museum of technology. He would have understood intuitively how each of these machines would have operated. This would have been the view that you had when you first walked into the museum through the front doors. It would have been like a church-like atmosphere where you would have seen prime movers, traction engines, agricultural steam engines, because what was more important than the machines that made other machines move? You would have walked along a long line of these beautiful traction engines, culminating at the end at the back of the museum with his own Highland Park engine. This interesting combination gas on one side, steam on the other side, nine of these huge engines operated in his Highland Park plant in Detroit before he moved out here to Dearborn. When he built his museum, he brought this giant machine with him. We're still here today that Tower Clock still has the same Seth Thomas machine in it, operating those giant dials. We're still displaying the things that Henry Ford loved, not necessarily all of the traction engines are on display anymore, but even after his death, we acquired some huge artifacts. There's so much to cover that I'm going to jump right into the issues of handling and moving and storage, because I notice that some of you do have collections in storage. Very few museums can display everything they have. The issue of moving big things in storage is such an important thing to consider that I've spent some time on this. This is an unusual sight to see, but when you have to move a big thing to a second floor and there's no elevator, we actually loan this to our rigor. Our rigor, if people aren't familiar with that terminology, are professionals with training in how to move big and heavy items. They tend to work with other companies that work with machinery, and our guy happens to have his firefighting museum, and he borrowed this artifact from us, and he sent us this photo. He had to use a crane to get it into the museum, so he's strapped it in safe locations on the strongest axle part, and he's getting up there to the second floor. This giant practically four ton machine went to Japan by air. That blew my mind, but it's the safest way to move things. We've had bad luck moving things by sea containers. This is how it got packed. We're working with a local contractor specializing in overseas shipping of machinery. As you can see, on a crate base, it would eventually be covered in a complete crate, as being sealed inside plastic, and we would have put dry silica gel inside the compartment someplace, even though air is much safer than sea, of course. In the case of this very large press, very important early press, it was going on a long-term exhibit that would travel from from location to location. I didn't want them to have to take the machine on and off the platform. What we did is what I call a plinth palette. It's a palette, but then it becomes a plinth when it's on exhibit. This black area right here is a permanent palette that the object is bolted down to, and then the shipping crate can simply be, this is false flooring that can be taken away, and then the shipping crate can just be assembled around it from venue to venue, and we of course now store the object. We got it back, and it's still in that crate, so that is a solution that might be useful if you know you've got something that has to go to multiple venues. This is a very large drill press that we recently got returned from the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and we were very happy that they included not only beautiful packaging using solid lumber, ethyl foam pads where they needed them, but they also marked on the box how big it is and how much it weighs, which makes the material handling so much handier. You need to know how big your door openings are and what your equipment can lift. In some cases, we make custom gantries. This is actually liftable winches with straps that are used for one particular artifact, a very long car, so this is a rare thing that we would make these expensive one-off lifting devices, but when an object is valuable enough, you're going to work with your rigor and come up with options like that. Our West Shore Services people also came up with, this is a switch, some kind of very, very heavy electrical device, and in this case, we made a custom steel pallet because the thing is just so heavy, permanently bolted down, still movable by forklift, so we can move it around in storage now on our own. In most cases, we love to get things up on dollies, so these are dollies that have trays in them. Horse-drawn vehicles, things with wooden wheels that have steel tires, can shrink and often do, even in the best circumstances, and sometimes you start something pushing and you're noticing the steel wheel wearing itself off of the wheel in its very hairy moment, so if you are able to get things up on moving dollies, that's always a desirable thing. In this case, of course, to get this huge traction engine onto this low-boy trailer for a temporary exhibit, believe it or not, at a state fair, we had to use a crane, so that is obviously not us again. That's our company West Shore Services who's coming in and doing that for us. Now, this is me up on top many years ago in a pretty much non-ocean moment. I should have been tied off and connected to something because I'm more than six feet off the ground, that's for sure, and if that's how I climbed up there, I was crazy, but that was many years ago, so I wouldn't do something that silly today, I'm sure. We're often using professional movers, so this is a company called Reliable. They move cars a lot, so here you can see we decided that this wagon, the wheels, were sturdy enough to move it on its own, but this is a little caveat that when moving things from one storage room to another, it's important to check them for things like mold. So this is the moment we discovered mold in one of our storage areas, and we had to do quick cleaning basically on the pavement outside, as the thing was moving from one storage room to another. In the case of this fabulous gypsy wagon, now you may argue this isn't an industrial object, but I just love it so much, I have to talk about it. It's got original paint on the side, it's so rare. It was supposedly traded to Henry Ford for an automobile at an auto dealership, it's an amazing story, but the paint is so fragile that we had to spend some time actually applying facing to it, like they would on a piece of fine art. This is a technique that paintings conservators use, and these are little tissues that have been adhered with a reversible adhesive, and this is a work obviously that a conservator would do, and then when we get it to a place where we want to exhibit it, we would use solvents to remove the facing, so it's something to consider that conservators can do. But here's something that anybody can do, and that's to apply protective coatings to metals. So in this case, I'm really talking about bare metals, so I'm talking about working surfaces that you're trying to protect, and not necessarily for exhibit. I'm talking about chrome-plated surfaces, nickel-plated surfaces, and just bare cast iron and steel if you've got it, or even wrought iron. This is a corrosion-inhibiting compound. This CRC company sells a whole bunch of different corrosion-inhibiting compounds. Pretty good company. This SP400 product comes in a spray and in a paintable type, and this is me applying it to parts of a knitting machine that are going into long-term storage. So here I'm degreasing it with mineral spirits, making sure that there's no gunk on the surface. Mineral spirits is very commonly available, and it's pretty much safe on many machinery. Even on sturdy painted finishes, if they're shiny and bright and well-adhered and they're not flaking off in any way, mineral spirits is probably the first thing to test. You always want to test it in an inconspicuous area, make sure it's not going to do anything unexpected, but I think that I can definitely recommend to most people to use mineral spirits to degrease things. So here I'm applying the CRC that comes out in a spray, and so on something shiny it's going to look yellowish, but on something, for instance, this may or may not be wrought iron, it looks very black and shiny, and I did this many years ago, and I went and touched it, and it isn't too sticky. This is actually a non-drying product. It's sold for temporary use for industry. They say it only lasts two years. This has been on for easily 10 years or more, and it's doing its job in storage. What I'm telling you is that we applied this, and you can tell by the date range we're really not sure when exactly this drill press was made. It was used at a forge that was in use for many, many years, but we can go back now, and conservators can look at this with material analysis, possibly do metallurgical analysis of the metal underneath. It's what conservators would call retreatable to have one of these reversible coatings on it. This is jumping around a little bit, but it's talking about one of the possible hazards with museum collections and also what to look at in storage. Our collection managers called me to look at this because they've been warned by us. We may know more than we should about these things, but they were worried that this oil could have PCBs, so everybody has heard of PCBs. They're toxic. What the major avenue of entry to the human body that is toxic is by touching them with bare hands. Of course, you wouldn't be touching anything with bare hands. The other thing to know about PCBs is that they're generally used in closed electrical systems, so in motors, in heavy oils, in electrical systems. The only place on this machine that could possibly have PCBs would have been the motor, which was located back here. This was from a moving part, so I could easily tell our collection managers that no, the likelihood that this would be PCB laden is very limited. What I was worried about on this machine was actually the rubber parts. Rubber is an important material in industrial collections. You find it in softer versions like this stuff, which is so soft and still degrades that it falls off. There's another material called hard rubber, which I'll mention later. I wasn't so worried about the oils. I was more worried about the rubber, and what I did was I removed these components, recorded where they came from, and put them in a bag and added them to the machine. The wooden pallets unfortunately absorb water at all times, and you can get chemically treated pallets that are supposedly more resistant to agents of deterioration, but we've really moved as much as possible for most items to using plastic pallets. We buy them in large quantities. Of course, you have to buy the one that is rated properly for the machine that you're putting on it. In this case, unfortunately, we didn't get a shot of the machine that tipped over. Although we chose the pallet that was rated properly, what we didn't realize is that it was so heavy, but only in one particular area, so it slowly crushed the pallet. What we've actually gotten to lately, and this is our now our new protocol, is when we have to strap a big machine down and it has point loads like this, we will put a plywood piece on the top of the pallet and bolt it down. We treat the plywood with biocidal paint on all sides for future use in storage. Also, many conservators will recommend this, use white paint. White paint allows you to see problems. If something is dripping out of this, you're going to see it. If something is breaking and degrading, you're going to see it. Here's a slide to remind us we're buying our things in bulk from Uline, but to make sure you're buying the pallet that is rated properly for what you're trying to put on it. We're also getting more and more into bulk containers. These are, you've got a pallet and then this is a removable collar and it's made out of polyethylene corrugated plastic, a little bit like coroplast. It's very useful to us because once you get the lid on, you can actually stack another pallet on top of it. For people who lack space, the other benefit that these pallet boxes give to us is that they are a form of insulation. We've got warehouse spaces that we keep minimally heated. We can't afford to air condition our very large volumes of storage space. What this allows us to do is by putting an extra layer of polyethylene plastic, often the objects inside have a separate box. You have layer upon layer of insulation that will buffer those terrible fluctuations in humidity that you might get in a remote storage area. We've actually put hydrothermal graphs inside the box and outside the box and we've proved that it really does slow down the rate of fluctuation. It turned out to be a really good thing. In some cases, if we're getting an object shipped to us from another museum here, this is from the American Textile History Museum. We made a huge acquisition from them recently. They put this giant bell onto this sturdy pallet with this great bracing and proper ethyl foam blocking. We're not going to take this off. We're not going to fuss with this pallet. This is a good pallet. We're going to leave it be. Again, this is just another notice to say, find the right pallet for the right object and strap it down properly, secure it to the pallet. This is another way to secure heavy, heavy objects to pallets. No amount of strapping would stop this sucker from sliding around if you really wanted to, but all of these 2x4 blocks that are screwed securely into a solid top pallet is the best way to go. In some cases, the object is on its own rolling dolly, a steel dolly and secured with bolts, so that's a great thing, but very few of our collections are done that way. This is something that I notice in storage. The thing is secured on a rolling cart, but unfortunately, we use an old piece of cribbing that we got from God knows where. We've got a little bit of mold in this storage area, so obviously we're getting some biological growth here. That's not cool. We've got to deal with that. When we take it off, we'll have to replace that. In the case of this object, when it comes to common vehicle tires, car tires, we will replace them. I know some museums get precious about that. You could keep one of the samples of the type of tire you're replacing in case you're nervous about it, but when it comes to common everyday tires, the fact that the car can be moved is more important than preserving ancient cracked tires. In this case, it's a little bit sad because obviously this tractor is partly important because of its early use of low pressure rubber tires. We did block up the back tires really nicely with custom chalk stands, but the front, unfortunately, we didn't. This tractor, this may be now damaged beyond repair. We're going to find out when we go to try to move it, but do watch out for things that are too heavy for their pallets. This is now going to be really difficult to deal with safely. You've got to know the weight of your objects. It's really helpful. Here's an object that we just moved around recently that unfortunately is completely sliding off its pallet and the strapping was never really secured. This thing has bolt holes. There's no reason not to use those bolt holes to secure it to a pallet properly, so we got our work cut out for us there. Sometimes the object is just too big, too top heavy. You've got to decide where you're putting it and then just leave it there. In the case of this giant dynamo, the pallet shelving was pretty much built right around it. It's in storage. I kind of wish it wasn't, but there it is. It's probably going to live there for another generation, I'm guessing, until it's called upon for whatever reason. In the case of these pontunes, our plan for our new storage area, which we're moving into in the next three to five years, we will make cantilevered shelving, because yes, we have these positioned across two different sets of pallet shelving, and we've got ethophonepads under them and everything, but they're actually hard to get at and hard to deal with, so we're hoping to get cantilevered arms coming out of the wall to support these. Working with rigors, even guys as professional as this, they've got their 10,000-pound rated forklift trying to lift a 25,000-pound object to put these Hillman rollers under, which are specialty moving devices, low-profile rollers for very heavy objects, but they couldn't get their forks into this huge electrical device because of the geometry of the object, and you can see that his back wheels are actually tipping up off the floor. They were able to kind of shove it around enough to get the rollers under and to get it where we needed them to move it, but even the professionals sometimes struggle with the weight of some of these things. Here's some of the equipment we use. These are the Hillman rollers. You can go to hillman.com and learn more about them if you're up to that level of moving things, but just about any museum that moves around a lot of heavy stuff could benefit from a pallet truck that actually has a scale built into it. We love this thing, it's very helpful. Once you know the weight of your pallet, you can just take that off and you can know the weight of your machine. Here's, we actually have a video of this drill press being moved. It's 11.5 feet tall, so we'll play that video now and I'll talk a little bit about that. We did this just recently because we were preparing the storage area for a larger mold treatment area, which I'll talk about in a minute, and it is, like I said, 11.5 feet tall. It lived in the same place for many, many years just because we knew that moving it required hiring outside contractors. I'm not seeing anything on the screen, so I'm not sure if it is playing. I don't know if participants are seeing anything. Oh, we're about to go. Let me start it here because it was playing. Wrong one. Hold on here. There we go. Here's the majestic machine being picked up with a forklift by our professional rigors. When things are top heavy, that's one time to call in the guys with their big equipment. They're using huge nylon strapping, as you can see, and there's four or five guys that are hovering around making sure that everything is secure. On a team like this, in anybody moving big equipment, it's important that one person be in charge and that they are calling the shots and that everybody, so here you can see Jeff, he's calling the shots. He's observing every second of every move and he's letting them know when they need to shift it one way or the other, or if there's anything that is of concern to him. It is a category of issue unto itself and maybe we can leave it at that, Mike. We won't try to show anymore. Get back to the story. I think we're having trouble with our videos. That's okay. That's a rare one-off thing that happened in storage. This is a move that happens every year. We have this beautiful wooden windmill in Henry Ford's birthplace yard because he had one when he was a kid. We restored the wooden blades, which are very fragile, and we decided that the brutal Michigan winter was just too much to expect this thing to live through. Every year in the fall, one of the guys from the historic operating machinery department climbs this pole and undoes the head. We bring in our own very large forklift and lift the head off and position it on this custom-made steel dolly that's on rollers, and we store it in another building in Greenfield Village. It makes for a kind of bleak-looking power for most of the winter, but we already have it back up for the season and it looks great and it survives a lot longer. That's another option for outdoor storage is to have a protocol to take things off exhibit when you need to. We did restore the head of that windmill, and this is just a shout-out to all the folks who do these involved restorations, but you have to understand that operating and restoring objects, you are altering that object. You are changing it in a way that it probably won't be able to be changed back, so the plan for the restoration and the preservation has to be really thought through, and obviously the conservation of original materials should be maximized at all times, but there is a CCI note, and most of my references are for the Canadian Conservation Institute's notes, which are so very practical and helpful. There is even one on trade literature, now that we've got Google, of course, that's easier to do, but you should know, even smaller museums, there are historians, there are people interested in industrial heritage who could help with primary source research to ensure that you at least have the correct color of paint and the right decisions to change and alter things, and the other thing, these are historic artifacts that are just like any other museum artifact. To do elaborate treatment on them, you have to make as-found statements. You have to say before you start what it looked like when you started, you should on large projects make a statement about what the goal of the restoration might be, and you have to document thoroughly with photos and written material. It's also important to document, in our case, in our collection management database, whether there are potential hazards present in the objects. Here's more on indoor display. We've obviously got a lot of things on display in the museum, which we finally got air conditioning in about the year 2000. We finally entered the 20th century, but here this caterpillar tractor was acquired in 1978, and this is what it looked like. Here's what it looks like today. The seat is in very rough condition, so this is a leather seat, and if this went for restoration, somebody might take the step to quickly put vinyl cover on it, and our curator of agriculture was already interested in what the fact that a leather seat on an object like this might say about the history of the production of this kind of machine. It's information that could easily be lost just because it looks horrible. I can tell you that we in our conservation department do have techniques that we can make this look a lot better and be a lot more stable. This may be the result of people at nighttime parties having selfies under the influence, but it also could be the horror of raccoons getting into the museum every now and then and sort of tearing stuff up. There's nothing more destructive than raccoons when they really want to. Museums have to think about what are the issues, what are people interacting with, what are they seeing, and what attracts them, and how do they interact with the collection. Here we have this wonderful engine that ran a silk mill for about 100 years before Henry Ford acquired it. It might have even been working at the time he bought it from them. This is what it looked like back in Ford's day, and it's still on exhibit here in the museum. It's an important engine, but it does have areas that are accessible to the public, including the cylinder for the piston, and cylinders would have gotten hot in the day, and they are always covered in some kind of insulating material. In this case, the insulating material is actually cow dung. This is probably not cow dung from Britain. This is probably cow dung that Henry Ford mixed with some straw and applied, the public picks at it. There's no question about it. It kind of grosses us out, but they do. What you see right here might be the mark of what the extent of that cow dung might have been originally, but we find it in little bits and pieces on the ground underneath the engine. Our rule of thumb around here is if they can, they will. If you let them touch it, they will touch it, so we have to protect things. Again, the CCI notes that talk about indoor display have a lot of great suggestions about how to secure machines so that the public can't hurt themselves on moving parts, gears getting pinched points, and things like that. Here we've got another windmill that's indoors, and it is displayed with this vicious-looking bug saw that has been secured not only with a steel wire strap, so that it can't really move, but it's also behind label, conveniently, so that people can't really poke themselves on the pointy bits here. We thought that was pretty clever. What about this glass ribbon machine? This is a machine that would have made up to 700 glass bits a minute. It would have been boiling hot when it was operated, and our concern with this was actually the cups that receive the glass. You're looking at these, and conservators are familiar with these kind of objects. We haven't tested it, mind you, but I'm guessing that this has asbestos in it. It's meant to accept a hot thing. We have taken the steps, and I've been trained, in low-level abatement, and what we've done is applied a Consolidant, and we will apply it on a regular interval. This machine was actually cleaned by hand. It was so covered in grease and glass fragments that we couldn't use any other technique. It took months to clean it, and as you can see, it was thoroughly degreased and actually repainted. This is another object that has been on exhibit for many, many years. Here is when it still had its flywheel, but when we redid the exhibit, there was no room for the flywheel. There wasn't even room really for a barrier around it. So this is an important object. It's right outside my office, and people can interact with it. We did abate the asbestos that would have been in the lagging. So this was done by a professional outside contractor. It probably doesn't look too historic. We might actually faux finish that a little bit if we wanted to, which we've done before on other things. But the governor balls are easily accessible, and people play with them all day long. So another rule of thumb we have around here is either fix it so it can't move, or leave it free moving. So in this case, we decided nobody's going to really hurt themselves too bad. The object isn't really being too badly damaged. You can see there's somewhere to the paint, but in the scheme of things, in that risk assessment that we're doing at all times with all of our huge collections, this is really the least of our issues. No, I don't think they would hurt themselves at all. That's funny. We leave this free moving. We allow people to turn it. In the case of the New Holland Combine, administrators decided this needed to be a climb aboard experience. Needless to say, we can't ask the public to climb a vertical ladder. That wouldn't even be allowed today. So we actually installed a huge set of spares. These are steel staircase. It was a huge architectural vision for this object to allow the public to climb aboard. Here's what you see when you get inside. We've used plexiglass to cover all the bits that could be damaged. They are allowed to operate some of these levers through slits in the plexiglass, but the really parts that can be really mauled have been covered. The seat, frankly, we've got a replacement seat. My colleague has found a puffer nagahide. So it's still a polyvinyl chloride, typical nagahide seat covering, but it's a little bit heavier weight and it holds up a little bit better to a lot of seats using it. So we swap out the seats as required. The Allegheny, the mighty Allegheny, was also turned into a climb aboard experience. There's buttons you can push to make it choo-choo and ding-ding. It really does entice the visitor and people spend a lot of time in it. These were built by our internal staff out of wood, these steps, and this is a view inside the cab now. So what we've done, there's so many different levers and handles, we've made most of them free turning. We also actually either reproduced or replaced many of the little levers and handles with replacements. So we kept the originals, we marked our replacements. That's super important. We stamped them or marked them in some way so that the future will know that those are not original components. Cover the firebox with some plexiglass, cover the floor with steel, a diamond plate steel plating, cover the windows unfortunately with plexiglass so that little tiny kids won't throw their little bodies out the window and fall 10 feet. But it's an elaborate thing to do. It's an invasion of the object, but it does contribute to the educational value of the object in a way that probably nothing else does. This is in Greenfield Village in our wonderful roundhouse that we got from Marshall, Michigan. It's showing a wheel press. I apologize for the backlit image, but what you've got is a wheel hanging off of a hook. So if somebody was really ambitious, they might want to try to get this thing swaying and could conceivably hurt themselves. So our railroad staff actually made a nylon strap that is like a double security thing. We conveniently put the object label on the strap to make it look intentional. And this is here actually, this is its maker's plate to remind me that maker's plates are particularly enticing to collectors for some reason. They're willing to damage a historic object by stealing the maker's plate. They'll actually unscrew them, especially in uncontrolled areas. What we've done is first of all, lock tight bolts down. So lock tight is a material that can sort of glue bolts into place. There's different grades of it. But we've also taken the extreme step of making reproduction maker's plates for objects that are in areas that can't be monitored as easily because we know they're just too inviting for collectors to take. So everything on exhibit obviously needs regular maintenance. Vacuuming is always a great thing. But as I mentioned earlier, mineral spirits is probably a safe thing for me to recommend that people use. You can see this is my former colleague Kathleen. She's wearing a nuisance mask that is actually rated for organic materials. So these are dust masks, but they're usually charcoal gray, and they can actually work in well-ventilated areas to help you because mineral spirits, yes, low toxicity, but still it is an organic solvent and it's something to think about. If I haven't mentioned it before, and I noticed she's not wearing gloves, I think she's doing vacuuming and not washing, but the issue of gloves around historic collections is in fine art museums, people wear gloves to protect the artifact. They're worried about what your greases and oils will contribute to damage to the artifact. And we have concerns about that with industrial collections too, but what I always tell new staff is you are wearing gloves to protect yourself from some of the hazards associated with these machinery, not the least of which is grease and oil and gunk. So I wear gloves all day long. Another material that we can recommend for cleaning is a mixture we make. The people trained in Britain call it V&A mix, it's from the Victorian Albert Museum. What it is is simply Orvis soap, which is very commonly recommended by many conservators for light cleaning, mixed in water and mineral spirits. So it's 3% Orvis soap in a one-to-one spilled water mineral spirits mix. So the soap and water is taking off, you know, the kind of things that soap will remove, salts and things like that and dirt, and the mineral spirits will help to wash away oils and also wash away the soap. So this is something we commonly use on our industrial collections, I can recommend it in general. And also the other safety concerns is climbing in high places and making sure you are either trained and have the right kind of scaffolding that you're wearing personal protection when you need to and being safe around historic collections. Maintaining things on exhibit is a struggle. There's no question about it, even in a museum like ours that has so many staff people, this is a surface plate that is in Henry Ford's Bagley Avenue shop. So this is a tiny little brick garage that he moved from Detroit to Dearborn to commemorate his own development of the famous quadricycle, his first experimental car, and it is set up as a permanent workshop including this surface plate, which is meant to be shiny bright steel. And you can see by the notes I've included in this slide how many different things I've tried to keep this thing shiny and bright, but what I'm trying to do is counteract the effects of a winter in Michigan which can have extreme ups and downs in weather. The sun shining through this window is heating up this metal surface every day and then every night it cools down and the water condenses on the surface. So a lacquer coating isn't holding up, a wax coating isn't holding up. What we really ought to do is follow some of the advice in the CCI notes and think about a non-drying film, some kind of oily material that we can apply to it and probably have to do more often. I've resisted it because of the periodic maintenance requirement, which is always more staff and more time and more effort, but I think that's what we're going to have to resort to in this case. We're back at it again and everybody has a great new idea of what will make this survive, but I can say that it's been a struggle in this little cave-like building at the Bagley Avenue shop. But one of the things I can recommend for an object like that that I use on an almost daily basis if you take nothing else away from this webinar, I want to preach the greatness of tannic acid because it is something that you can apply to a bare, rusty surface that one is dry, orange-looking surfaces even if they have active corrosion. If you know you have salts present, that's a whole other ball of wax, but if you're convinced that all you've got is pretty much rust, there's nothing stopping you from getting this CCI note, making up your own concoction of tannic acid. It's very easy to do. You apply it warm to the surface and try to frost it up because what you're making is essentially a patina. You're turning the rust into a more stable corrosion product, which unfortunately is really not water impermeable. It's not a coating. If you needed to put this outside or in an uncontrolled environment and make it look great, you'd still have to put a wax or some other coating on top of it. But if you do enough coats of this and you apply it well and you frost it up really nicely and you're patient and you use it in a heated way, you can get a nice beautiful glossy, purplish coating. I think it's great for many, many agricultural objects and all kinds of industrial objects. I use it all the time. This is another object that's in that Bagley Avenue shop, which is shockingly owned by Henry Ford. We should probably put a more generic object in there because every year it does get this splash rust too. In an object like this, what we would do is use very, very fine steel wool, four-ought steel wool, very commonly available, or we might use white 3M pads. 3M pads are nylon, I believe, abrasive pads. You can get them in various weights. The issue here is to test in an inconspicuous area because what you don't want to be doing is polishing away beautiful machine turnings or interesting finishes that are on the surface of the machine. Wiping this with a little bit of steel wool, applying some tannic acid, that's a safe thing that most people can do. Then getting a wax coating on there or some kind of oil, which again the CCI notes get into detail about. Display outdoors, wow. These are going to be the objects that are under the most giraffes. Basically this is not in our collection, although we do have some of these baggage cars on exhibit. This is tough because this doesn't even have any coating on the wood. Now this object happens to be underneath a little bit of a roof, so at least it doesn't get the worst of the weather. But objects like this, which is a hose cart, a lot like that one you saw dangling in the air earlier, it really doesn't interpret what a hose cart is because they probably lost the hose many years ago. It maybe got ripped off or it was just too rotten to leave out. So how do you even know what this is? And not only that, it's basically collapsing under its own weight. The paint has worn off. The joints are starting to break. To me it doesn't really interpret what a hose cart is. And unfortunately museums sometimes they just have nowhere else to put it. So they leave it on outdoor display. I can't tell you how many, you drive in the country and you see people with moldering things, breaking down in their yard, returning to the earth a little bit, and conservators just cringe when they see stuff like that. This is a piece of rolling stock obviously that's on permanent exhibit. Train cars that are outside anything like this, it should be considered almost like a little building. And it should be maintained like a little building. So we actually got into this train car and saw some troubling signs of water seeping on the inside dribbling in. And we happen to come in on a rainy day, which is a great day to inspect an object like this. So yeah, we saw sure water patterns on the exterior too. But what we're noticing is the damage is actually accumulating at the bottom. So behind here is a very large wooden structural member that is actually swelling from constant water ingrass and it's actually blowing the panel right off. So this is a very heavy steel panel. And it is being really badly damaged over long term. They need to deal with the roof. You know, those planes that are in Windsor, Ontario are replacing a huge Lancaster bomber that used to be there up until I could remember. They took it down a few years ago, put up this sign because that giant Lancaster was on exhibit for 40 years. You know, they tried to keep the birds out. They tried to keep things cocked and sealed, but really it was deteriorating very badly. A colleague in Canada, Sue Maltby, has worked with her local sheet metal contractors to develop treatment protocols to keep birds out of planes like this. But I was just delighted when they took this thing down. And those two planes that are on poles are actually replicas of smaller planes. So I'm glad to see that the real object has actually been removed. But, you know, CCI does give advice if you absolutely have to display your stuff outside. Think about trying to get a roof over it. At least put it in the shade of a building so it's not getting direct weather. If you can afford to put a nice shed over it. If you can afford a concrete pad that sheds water nicely, that's great. But at least get it on a gravel bed so that it's not sitting in a pool of water. If it's a vehicle, get it up on chalks. Ideally, you know, if you have to tarp it, try to get poles so that the tarp isn't directly up against the machine. You know, people use that shrink wrapping that people put on boats, right? And we even had an object that had that on it. It is only, those things, those shrink wrap things are only designed for one or two years of use. And unfortunately, what they do is they make a microclimate inside and often make ideal nesting sites for rodents and birds. So it's something to think about. And again, another plug for the CCI notes, just practical everyday advice for just about any museum. The portier on traction engine is displayed in the summer outside. In the winter, we take it down and tarp it. So, you know, displaying things that need restoration, the issue becomes documentation and careful research into authentic finishes, authentic parts and sourcing. All kinds of skill trades are required often. This is a plug to any other museum out there that has original finishes, especially on early agricultural machinery. Henry Ford happened to be collecting things pretty early, although this obviously was acquired in the 90s. It's in, I think, original condition. So these early agricultural finishes are often very, very thin. They sometimes don't even have a primer coat, but museums like ours have to save these things and not display them outside, because these are going to be the records that other people are going to have to look to when they are doing restorations of their equipment to get not only authentic colors, but authentic paint character, right? So here's a restoration that I did. It was a pretty, I would call it a conservation treatment, because this planar was basically black all over the way Henry Ford liked things, but it turned out that underneath that black paint was an original paint finish that was quite beautiful. And on this, you know, this was early in my career here, and I spent many happy months doing mechanical paint removal on this, picked it off with a scalpel one little bit at a time to reveal the original paint coating. In the case of this Franklin engine, we did chemical paint removal. So we'd be working in about a five square inch area at a time after careful analysis and microscopic analysis of each layer of the paint. We determined what, you know, what the original layer was, and we took all the other paint down to that layer. The flywheel had been painted with aluminum paint. And that was easy to take off and get down to the red color. So this is an instance of what I call conservation by confiscation, because this was an early typewriter, very early, that had been on an exhibit in Edison's Menlo Park Library. And it was degrading that the surface was getting very oxidized just because it, you know, it couldn't handle the environment. So we worked with volunteers to make a replica. Now, this is a non-working replica, but it looks a lot like the original should have looked when it was made. So I think this is a pretty good solution, not something that's easy to do with much bigger, complicated objects. This Ross chariot, for instance, we worked with an outside contractor in Pennsylvania. There's only about four or five places that I know in the country in private practice that will take on huge projects like this. Some museums have locomotive shops, but very few places will do large technology artifacts. In the case of this wonderful chariot that had original upholstery inside, the upholstery was damaged and moth-eaten, but you can tell how beautiful it is. It was definitely worth preserving. So we worked with a textile conservator who worked on the upholstery, and another conservator worked on it. This is a detail of the paint on the exterior. That's such a beautiful detail. This is what it looked like before it went out for conservation. It was just beat up, and that's just from display in the museum. There was almost no paint left on the wheels, and everything was cracked and just looked terrible. This is the restoration that I actually worked on. We were trying to replicate the, I lost my arrow. Can't get my arrow. I don't know if Mike can help me with that. Oh, there we are. The car, we found documentation that it looked like this during its working life. It had interesting stenciling on, which we could actually see through the overpaint. So the original owner had just painted it whenever he felt like it, of course, and this is what it ended up looking, but we could see the shadows of the original paint. So we were able to recreate the original paint look. What we actually did was overpaint it. We put a barrier layer between the overpaint and our new over overpaint. So yes, it looks restored, but really all the other original layers of paint are all underneath our restoration paint job. We replaced, as you can see, the inappropriate black tires for appropriate white tires in that treatment. We also did this elaborate stripping of chrome plated headlights to reveal the nickel plating that was underneath the chrome. This is something I would never have done if I didn't have a volunteer with a plating chemist. Plating is complicated stuff, but you can see the difference of the beautiful warm nickel plating and the kind of hard, cold chrome plating. Chrome plating really wasn't commercially available until the late 1920s. So it's something that uninformed restorers often do. They'll chrome plate things that ought to be nickel plated. Here's an object that was restored before my time. It had spent many decades in Greenfield Village sort of almost returning to the earth. It was kind of abused and climbed upon and just in terrible condition. It was taken down to every single bolt. They did paint analysis and determined that the original paint scheme was white. And so this beautiful Gothic engine is now on exhibit in the Henry Ford Museum. And this is a slide to remind me that everybody needs to know their limits. I'm willing to take on a lot of different projects, but here we had to polish and relacker this hoop around the outside of this crazy TV. And even just taking the TV apart, we realized was outside of our area of expertise. So we called in television Tom who had expertise in undoing the wiring harness and knew how to put it back together. So it's something to think about with technology objects. What do you know? What do you need to know? In the case of locomotives, we have our own locomotive restoration and operation facility which has three full-time mechanics and four full-time engineers and two part-time firemen who all can do big restorations like this. We blogged about it on our site at the museum. It really took more than 20 years, although the focused effort took about seven years once they got all their stuff together. They took it apart piece by piece and replaced, of course, the original boiler would have had asbestos and they replaced it with a calcium silicate material. So there's always new ways to make things safer. You can learn more about that elaborate restoration on our website. This is an object that has been on exhibit for many years. I try to maintain things in original condition. But in the case of this, it's at the Firestone Farm. It's meant to depict the 1880s. It had an original finish on it when we put it out there in about 1985. And this is what the finish ended up looking like. I find it quite beautiful, but I can understand why the program people didn't care for it. It doesn't look like a farmer would have been using it in 1880. It looks like a 100-year-old wagon, right? So I tried to maintain it with what I called conservative restoration, only replacing boards that got broken, trying to consolidate and coat bare areas. But really, we finally gave up and allowed them to completely repaint it. Unfortunately, they did not refer to my documentation and didn't choose the color. There's different conventions for naming colors. One is the Munsell system, and they didn't refer to my documentation on it. So they got the decorative detailing quite nice, and the paint is protecting the wooden surface, but there could have been a little bit more research done. So I can preach what to do properly, and sometimes our own institution, we could do better in this department. So now I'm talking about operation, and if we have time to play the video, I'd like to do that. That it's a locomotive video. It's coming. Can we do that? I hope it works. What I'm showing is this, there we go. So here we have one of our, we have three regularly operating steam locomotives in diesel roads. We also have a diesel electric locomotive, and a gas locomotive, and a bunch of passenger cars. So this is Max, he is doing what I consider to be almost performance archaeology. The guys who maintain these locomotives, they have to really recreate the kind of work that the guys who originally maintained those machines would have done. So here's that beautiful port here on engine that sits outside for most of the year, and then twice a year or so, we actually pull it out into the field. It brings its own water wagon with it, and it brings its own threshing machine, and we set up the threshing machine and operate it. So these are people who are dedicated to all the kind of ins and outs of operating these machines. You're admitting that you're giving up something for the actual preservation of the original materials, but what you're gaining is the intangible value of what operating equipment can teach people. So my colleague Allison Wayne in Australia wrote a really eloquent piece in the Journal of the American Association of Conservation in May 2017 on the importance of movement and operation as a preventive conservation strategy for heritage machinery. She's saying that if the skills get lost, and the idea of the value of these things to the community gets lost, then that is almost as bad as losing the object. So I think we're having a hard time showing the video, but that's okay because I'll be able to talk about that in the slides that I'm showing. You know, this Bugatti Royale, one of six that exist in the world of the Bugatti type, we do keep operational because it's just easier to move it around at car shows under its own power. It's so huge and you have to move it around so we do keep it operational. There's other resources that talk about motorized vehicles that we'll go into a lot more detail about how to flush lubricants, make sure you don't leave batteries in cars on exhibit. That's a terrible thing that can cause a lot of damage and keeping things up obviously on spans when you want to protect the tire wheels. When we exhibit things that are moving in the museum, for instance, we use very tall gates and fences, so these are what we call our OSHA barrier, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would have called for these and when we decided to operate this huge stationary steam engine, we installed this barrier. The operator can actually turn it on and off with a lever that he never has to step foot inside the fence to do so. And that's true for this huge triple expansion steam engine too, this generated power. It's a electrical engineering landmark actually in the country because it's so important. It had also been on exhibit in Greenfield Village and was brought in and restored piece by piece. So now it turns very slowly to show people how it works with a huge electric motor inside, but in addition to the barrier, we also have pads that would shut the machine off if people walked on them or on the other side where we don't have the pads, we have actually electronic eyes that would trip. So it's like a beam that would trip if visitor were to cross it. So it's double security for operating equipment on exhibit. I wonder if we want to try the locomotive. I guess it didn't really work. But this is the steam traction engine, getting ready to go into the field and this is Matt who particularly cares for this object. And you can see that there's a lot of issues here. I understand that some states don't require boiler operators to have licenses, but it's definitely recommended that these guys have some kind of training from outside expertise to keep an eye on these very, they're bolted together with steel plates. They can explode and they've been known to explode. They've been known to be fatalities involved in historic operating machinery. It's not something to be taken lightly, it's something to be thought through. People have to have written policies and know what they're dealing with. You're not just boys playing with toys, it's serious business. So the video would have shown that steam traction engine pulling its water wagon and here's the belted up threshing machine that separates the chaff from the seed and here's a guy in historic costume who's actually the person whose job it is to make sure that the belts are on safely. So we do not let the public near these objects. These are all staff people because what comes flying out of this machine are very sharp objects. It is again what I call performance archaeology because the guys working with it today have come up with actually a better way to make sure that the stuff isn't coming into their face. They put some baffles to make sure that the chaff would not hit them in the face quite so bad. So they're constantly doing little tweaks and it does teach them what the guys operating them back in the day would have had to put up with. So it's kind of fascinating. We do use volunteers for different operations around the place. They always have strong opinions. They can bring a wealth of information. I mean, this guy was using horse-drawn farm equipment when he was growing up. So he had stuff to teach us and we worked very happily with the skills that he had. When you're keeping things operational, this is an Oliver plow in Greenfield Village. It was already put together from two other broken plows when we decided to put it into operation. It is, it goes through the ringer every year. I cannot tell you, the record would tell me how many times the beam has been replaced. So, you know, agricultural equipment will typically have a wooden element that is designed to break. If certainly horse-drawn vehicles, farm equipment, will have some kind of a pitman arm, some kind of a thing that is designed to actually break before anything else does because it's such a brutal thing to pull things through a field. You don't know what you're going to encounter. The horses have sometimes a mind of their own. This beam is broken many times. Every manager has worked with this farm equipment, has one of these broken beams in their office. We luckily have another Oliver plow in pristine condition on exhibit and we have replicated the important decal, the stencil, pardon me, so we can replace this beam as necessary. We also have to replace the plow share, which is the part that goes through the ground. That gets basically just worn down. So Oliver was famous for having developed a new technique called the chilled plow. That's what it's called, a special annealing process for the plow share that we have not been able to replicate. This is now, just this year, 10 new blades that we've had made for it. Getting something cast by reliable foundry is an elaborate process and it's expensive. So if you can get multiples made and you can afford to get multiples, that's probably the best way to do it. If we can work with other museums to recreate the chilled plow technique, we would be delighted. When you do operate historic equipment, here's one of our historic machine shops, you're going to have to cage off moving parts. So this was dictated to us by OSHA. We had to put fencing around things. Things that in Henry Ford's day would have just flailed around happily and been out there and authentic to the period. Now you walk in the building and you see these cages, which aren't exactly historically authentic, neither is the barrier, mind you, but it's a concession we have to make if we want to operate these things. Because out at that Armington and Sims machine shop, we have a program that we operate at Turret Laid, which is super cool. The public can come in and make a little candlestick on this machine and we've taken the time again to use plexiglass and other areas to block off anything moving so that they can't hurt themselves. And also there is a presenter hovering over them ready to stop them from doing anything silly. So the brass comes in, it's fed in, and then the turret comes in and each tool on the turret performs a different function to make an object. So it really is a special learning experience to understand how machine tools work. Also in Greenfield Village, we have Edison's Menlo Park Machine Shop where we demonstrate phonograph every day. This is a very early production phonograph. There were about 200 of them made, nine are known to exist. We own four of them and we operate this one almost every day. The presenters are trained by us in how to operate it. They do not service the machine, we service the machine. We lubricate it every day. We have a department called the Historic Operating Machinery Department that maintains about 120 operating machines and we provide instructions and we carefully train every single presenter. We impress upon them the importance of the object, the rarity of the object and then exactly how to operate it. This object has been operated for many years. It's delighted many people, including some pretty famous people. If you don't recognize Bill Ford Jr. He's the chief of the Ford Motor Company and this guy may be me, I hope needs no introduction. Bill Gates. We bring VIPs because this is a special opportunity. We have replaced parts that we knew would wear especially badly. This is a reproducer arm, sort of business end. This is where the needle is located that makes the recording. This is a completely new brass piece. It's been very clearly marked as reproduction but it's really hard to keep things on exhibit this was polished up and put outside but they didn't put any protective coatings on it. This is actually a different one than the one that operates every day. This is what it looked like when I finally decided to deal with it. Oh my God, look at that rust. It looks just terrible. So I had to repolish it and on objects that are not going to be operated, of course, I'll put a lacquer coating but on things that are operated it's hard to keep a lacquer coating working. This is the original paint on the one that doesn't get used. This is what the paint original markings look like now on the one that does get used every day. I'm very sad to report that I've watched this paint wear down over time but we do try to document it. My ideal would be to make a reproduction but that would be quite expensive and there is some thrill of using a piece of machinery that might have touched Thomas Addison. So I'm working now with all kinds of material that you might encounter in industrial collections. There's some hazardous materials you may encounter. As best as I mentioned is one. We see it quite a bit. This is a five inch tall object that when you see this hairy white stuff and it's an electrical thing with wires on it, you're like, oh yeah, that's probably asbestos. We would pop that into a polyethylene bag for sure and then deal with it later, maybe work with an outside contractor. This is a piece of early Addison projecting kinetoscope that had arc light inside. So this is a very, very hot arc light. So this would have had asbestos plates in it and I would have had to deal with those. Here's another object, a weird alcohol iron that had an asbestos plate in it. So people should get familiar with this but you can also get these things tested to confirm what they are. And of course, steam engines and lagging and piping would be covered with it. We work with outside contractors who do the covering of it. The Demaxian House had some asbestos that was in the tarry covering that had been sprayed on the inside and we were actually got three days of training from another trainer in how to do wet abatement. So it depends on is it friable? Is it, you know, how easy is it to deal with? Do you have protocols? So, you know, we learned how to suit up and deal with asbestos but that's a special training. In this case, on the right, you're seeing this hazardous radioactive materials inside that this was some radioactive materials that actually came out of our glass shop. You've heard of radium glass perhaps. This is, we would use an outside disposal company. These are people who are specialized dealing with institutions that generate hazardous waste. We have our own Geiger counter. We're checking things all the time because things like radio luminescent paint was used especially on dials of airplanes. Also, unfortunately, clocks, including clocks made into the 1950s and even the 1960s. This one was particularly hot and I'm using lead line bags that are used for films, taking films through security x-ray points. The issue with radiation, of course, is to keep it away from people. This is an extremely low level but we just don't want people handling it unnecessarily. So, it's clearly marked in storage with symbols that people recognize, just stay away from it. This scared the bejesus out of me when I first encountered it. It's a foot warmer and it was marked with a maker stamp x-radium. Wow, tested it with the Geiger counter. Not hot, not dangerous. This was another story. It was a sample kit of ore manufacturers taking them around to people to try to sell the products from ore manufacturing. It was definitely hot. So, we actually used lead sheeting to contain it and hold on to it until we could get disposal people in there. PCBs, something to think about. I mentioned earlier, capacitors fluorescent light ballastids usually contain and you can get it tested. We're looking at this object for this oil might be PCBs. Don't touch it with your bare hands. Lead in the sheeting when it's solid, you know, isn't going to jump out and bite you. It's the corrosion product that you have to worry about. This flaky white stuff, easily recognizable and very friable. So, it's something that maybe conservators would want to treat for you. We definitely, when we identify them, we isolate them so that our collection managers won't inadvertently run into them. Mercury is something you might see in historic collections and you can get mercury cleanup kits to deal with it. If it's in a sealed glass, you don't have to worry about it. It's sealed. It won't hurt you, but if it is in an open container like in this meter, the mercury was located inside these cups. We use that mercury cleanup kit is amalgamates with the metal filings, grabs the mercury and allows you to take it away. You put it in a container again. Your hazardous waste disposal people will deal with it. We do have bat guano in storage. You can read about the horrible fungal infections, histoplasmosis you can get from bat guano, especially if it gets in dirt. There has never been a case of histoplasmosis in Michigan, but I can't say for the rest of the country that it's not dangerous. It's something to think about. You know, we've taken to the extent of putting down newspaper now in the areas that we know that a little bat might have a little resting spot. Mold is something that we are constantly aware of because things don't come in. They're dirty when they come in sometimes. It is particularly attracted to rubber on historic artifacts. We look out for it, we deal with it constantly and it's something to think about. We've made a special containment room in one of our big storage with plastic and a clean room type atmosphere so that we can vacuum things off and check them for mold before they come in. And finally, cadmium corrosion. Another thing that you should definitely take away from this is to look out for this bright yellow corrosion product. It was used as a rust inhibiting coating and you can see it's this bright, bright yellow. It's something to really, it's highly toxic in many different ways. Even a carcinogen. Here it was in a, it was in a TV. But the whole chassis was coated with it. We've worked out techniques to remove it. We use container to work on it so we're not poisoning ourselves. We're looking also for fuel things come in with fuel in them. Batteries have to be removed. Very, very important. It's sometimes difficult to get batteries out of things but it's very valuable to do so. If you want to preserve them, that's a whole other story. But leaving them in things risks total damage and loss. So here's some of the organizations they're in the handout that talk about these things at their conferences. I love this organization, Big Stuff. They're having their next meeting in Chile in September which I unfortunately can't attend. They talk about all the things that I've talked about today including issues of ethics and significance when it comes to this kind of collections. Mutual concerns talks about airplanes. The National Association of Automotive Museums talks obviously about cars. You've got the train guys and also agricultural museums will have a working group to talk about machinery. So that's my presentation. I haven't left any time for questions but if Susan wants to tell me what some of the more important ones are, I promise to spend more time online and on the forum answering any questions that you have. Okay, I don't know. It's hard to sort these out on the fly. What I'll do is I will send them to you and you can write answers and then I'll post the questions and the answers when you get them done. And then the next few days I will post the recording, the PowerPoint slides and the handout. And I will amend the handout. There are a couple of things that people noted and I will add those to the handout. And I think that's it. I'll be online. I will catch other questions if you have them. So please post them and join us in two weeks. To talk about emergency vendors and remember that if you have an emergency, there's a 24-hour hotline from the AIC National Heritage Responders and they can help you with that. So thank you and thank you, Clara. And thank you, yes. I apologize that I went late and didn't leave time for questions but as you can tell this big stuff is just big to the OS. And I noticed people are mentioning Brian Howard in Pennsylvania who is one of the guys who would deal with big stuff. There's also conservation solutions. They're a very large firm. There's McKay Lodge in Ohio that I can recommend for big stuff and there's a few other places. Yeah, if you want to give me the list of those people I would add them to the handout too. Okay. Yeah. So this is great. Thank you so much and thank you for everyone that came and we'll hope to see you in a couple of weeks. And remember if you have questions you can always ask them on the forum and get answers. Great. So thank you very much.