 to your host, Susan Berger. Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. We're really pleased that you've stuck in with us this long, and today we're going to have a really interesting webinar, as usual. If you need to contact me, my email is here. And I just want to go over quickly, and we'll do it at the end, too. I will need to have your assignments by November 26. If you're planning to get the Credly badge, so you need to do all your assignments, and you need to listen to all the webinars. There are a few people that have listened to the webinars but not done anything else, and I may send you an email just to ask you if you're in this for your own interest or if you want a Credly badge. So keep that in mind. And other than that, I'm going to turn this over to Mark Waimling, who's the course coordinator. And if you have any questions, put them in the general chat, and we'll collect them and make sure they get answered. So, Mark, go ahead. Thank you, Susan. Welcome, everybody. I'd like to introduce our today's speaker. Jamie Haskell has been a mountain maker for over 25 years, working in major institutions and private collections across the western United States of Canada. He learned mountain making while working at the University of Washington, Burke Museum. And his further studies and conservation have contributed to this holistic philosophy of exhibit, execution, and collections care. At this point in his career, Jamie has been working on the education and training of a new generation of museum professionals to help replace the outgoing stream of senior staff all over. He conducts workshops at Meltmaking Focus Studio in Seattle, as well as providing on-site instruction. I'd like to thank Jamie for joining us today. We look forward to your presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Susan and Mike. I'm very honored to be part of this process. Mountmaking is a really quite an interesting craft. Hard to kind of put it. It's hard to call it an art or a craft. It's a bit of engineering. It's a bit of everything, but it has held my attention for 25 years plus. So the goals for this webinar, I'm hoping to help you understand the purposes of mountmaking and learn to conceptualize how a mount comes together and works for the object. And then we'll talk about materials and fabrication techniques, how we use to build mounts. Now, before we start, I just want to talk about one quick thing, and that is the subject of safety. And I bring this up because our work is a difficult work when we're doing really kind of things that don't have necessarily an easy or a straightforward way to do. And so this order of priority to me is really pretty sacred, and that is that the first thing is that the safety of people is primary, whether those persons are building the exhibits or those visiting them. People are primary concern. The safety of the objects is the second concern. We are there to preserve the objects. This is about collections care. And so immediate and long-term object safety are both to be considered in our mountmaking. And then having the exhibit look great and get done on time is absolutely what we're after, but this has to remain subservient to the other two. Through good planning and design, we'll get it all done. Okay, so this mountmaking. Mountmaking is a preventive conservation practice, primarily in my mind. It's a technique for enhancing the display of objects, really making things shine. If you think of a mask that is sitting straight up and down, looking straight forward, it's very static. A little mask, a little cock to the right, and a little loom, and all of a sudden, it has all the emotion that it would hold in the dance. So we're able, through proper mountmaking, to do things with the objects that give them the ability to tell their story better. And mountmaking is really a thought process because we're solving problems of support and of balance to go along with the aesthetics. And we're doing this in the museum environment where we are really trying to make this all integrate into a proper display. So what is a mount? A mount is a structure that can kind of supply appropriate support to an object and safely maintain it in that position. So this picture is of a very heavy native copper. This is at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau where I worked a couple of years ago. They built a brand new museum if you had a chance to go to Juneau and see it because there's a fabulous museum. We wanted this to look like this mannequin figure was holding the copper up, but it is being held by a mount that goes to the back wall. But we built the mount in such a way that we were able to adjust the angle, off-kilter to the back on the proper right side and a little rotation to the proper right, and now it really looks like the figure is holding it. The essential concept of a mount, you're probably all sitting on a mount. There are some mounts that are better for short-term use and some that are better for long-term use, like Victory Chicken, that is our mascot of our string band. So what are the common purposes of a mount? We build mounts for a whole raft of different reasons and there are different individual missions in each one. One is to stabilize a self-supporting object. This is at the Asian Art Museum in Seattle or within the original installation of the Asian Art Museum. This very large ceramic is very sturdy. It stands well on its own, but its base is fairly narrow and we wanted to stabilize it. So here there's a plexiglass blade. There's bound to be some sort of either monofilament or a cable around the neck on that. And if you look at the very bottom, there's kind of a half-moon that cradles the base so that it can't roll away from that blade. The blade is then screwed down to the display surface. One is to display or flow the structurally sound object to make it fly. So this strong dynasty horse is, again, in good condition, but it's not something that you set on the deck. So we made a mount that lets it be in this great running position and gives it life. Sometimes it's to support a flexible or an unsound object. So this native headdress, which is at the Alaska State Museum, is made of red trade cloth and baleen and feathers. The trade cloth is totally floppy. It needed support. So this mount has a metal ring that is here. There are magnets on the interior, and then it has a strut coming up that supports... There's the pointer. Strut coming up that supports the baleen vertical that is supporting the top nut of the feathers. And so through the use of the mount, we were able to give this the support that it needs to be on display for a long time. And then other is to be a structurally joined support unconnected broken or composite elements of the mount. So this Yupik whale mount has flippers and hands that were originally on the mask by pieces of quill. So at the base connecting the flipper to the mask itself, there is a piece of probably Dupur goose quill that is connecting those pieces, but it's not really very sound. So here we needed an actual structure to connect those pieces to the mainstay of the mask. We use mounts for sizing stabilization. This is, again, from the Asian Art Museum in Seattle. And this horse has a base and a set of legs that are very narrow. So if we tied the base down in a sizing convent, it would break off at the ankles. So this mount goes up and inside through a large hole that is in the belly as a part of these pieces. And those black masses are large padded inserts and each goes in one in the front, one in the back, and are tied together by the brass mount itself that comes down to the base plate. This controls the upper part. So in the event of a seismic event, it does not fall over and it is gently tied all the way to the bottom, but, again, should not break off at the legs. There are lots of different ways of being seismic stabilization. This happens to be one we could. And then security is another issue that comes up again and again with mounts. In general, in my opinion, I don't like to feel that mounts are a security measure. They're not really a good substitute for appropriate security systems and oversight. Retention mechanisms that are strong enough to keep an object from theft don't generally, we don't think of them as mounts. We will definitely use them, but I like to think of a mount as being a little more for the previous purposes that I mentioned. This is a good place to put the first hole. So I'm going to roll that in. So as we go on, we're going to be talking about the shape of objects. So now I'd like to talk about what are the components of a mount. So generally in a mount, there's some sort of main structure that is kind of the main part of the mount. From there, we have retaining mechanisms that keep the object in place and will be what's taking weight possibly or maintaining it onto the main structure if that's what's taking weight. And then we'll have an attachment structure that comes down to whatever the display substrate is, the deck or back to the wall or whatever. So there's these kind of three bits to most any mount. So then we like to talk about what are the missions of the mount? What is the mount trying to do? Well, the first mission really for the object is to provide support. And the level of support needs to be appropriate for the materials and conditions of the object. This is especially important for things like basketry and hide and wood. A lot of wood isn't as sturdy as it necessarily seems. Structurally compromised objects where you've got either damage or there's detached elements such as with the whale mask that need to be supported. When we're doing all this, we need to spread the load to accommodate the leverage and the balance that's part of the shape and the distribution of weight in the object. We would be avoiding point loads, places where the weight is concentrated on one little point of contact. We want to support the overall structure. Make sure that we're kind of cradling the object. There are things that we'll do just fine with lower amounts of support and there are things that need it. We'll choose those support locations to protect surfaces. We will be looking for friable surfaces or fugitive pigments or things like that. Edges that are damaged or sharp edges that we could get a concentration of pressure on. Other damage areas, cracks, places where the object just isn't really as strong as we want. We want the mount to help the object behave as a unit. We don't want to hold it at one end and the other end and connect to those pieces, connect to the mounts by using the object. We don't really want to make it so that we apply stresses to the object in its mounting. We're going to really try to work with that to help the object behave as a unit and that's especially important in a seismic situation. We're using the mount to enhance stability. This ceramic is the basic stability. It's a very narrow base. We don't want the object to be able to start rocking if there's any sort of forces on it. We want it to just sit right there. This is partly a seismic stabilization thing as well and seismic is not only earthquakes, but seismic in the larger sense is ambient vibration. There's trains going by, construction nearby, carts rolling across the floor. And then there's errant human forces as I'll refer to them, which I think of that as a eight-year-old child who's had a cookie and a Coke running into the exhibit furniture. An errant floor buffer that's going back and forth and hits the pedestal. Those are all things that we're using the mount to stabilize and to hold on to it. There's an issue of visual stability and objects that vibrate or move can make people on music. I was just in an exhibit and a beautiful samurai helmet was supported by a mount that was just a little too light and it sat and bobbed just with the vibration of the building and there was nothing you could do about it. It just was there and it was not really a good. Also something that even if you have a very small post and a large object that is from an engineering point of view strong enough to support it still, sometimes that support is visually just too small and it isn't harmonious. Those are little things and they're stylistic things that we also want to think about in our mountmaking is we want this object to feel really just nice and solid. Mounts have to be noninvasive. They have to be totally reversible. This is the basic tenet of conservation. We can't do anything to the object that we can't undo. So we can't drill into the object. We can't nail into the object. We can't glue to it. There are some exceptions but these are usually the purview of conservation or the artist or other things. Holes are occasionally drilled into large stone sculptures for mounting posts. It's not something that we just do. It's usually with a living artist or if there's no other way to hold on to something. Reinforcements, Japanese tissue used to reinforce a textile. That's going to be conservation. That's mountmaking. Sleeves stitched to textiles unless you have people that are fully trained and very well versed in doing that. Again, I feel that's a conservation task. Sometimes we can make changes to bases and other elements. We can screw into them but that's a pretty specific caveat. Our mounts have to be force neutral and this is a term I came up with to kind of think about holding an object gently, pradling it. The mount mustn't apply any distorting forces to the object. The mount should hold it loosely enough to allow the movement of it, the expansion contraction with temperature and humidity, and just things like raw high, especially when I think of a plateau plains car flash or a quiver or something like that. They aren't really stable and so the mount needs to have just enough room so that they can move without starting to distort. The object must never be distorted to load it into the mount. This is one of those things that has traditionally been not really looked at quite as an important thing. You can go ahead and squeeze that little into the prons or the mount should never be distorted to load the object into it. You can pull the prons apart and snap them around that object. That's been a lot of damage to objects where there are tracks, where there are scratches and things like that. These are some of those things that as we've gone on without making, we've really tried to look at these modes of damage. Now we use removable retention elements that may be attached to the base of the main structure of the mount with a screw that's drilled and tapped into the base, something like that. So we really try to keep the mount from being distorted to do anything we wanted to just fit correctly from the get go. Finally, some appropriate materials. They have to be physically gentle and abrasion. We have nice soft materials. Always be what's in contact with the object. They have to be chemically compatible. The Audi testing, which is an accelerated aging test to show off-gassing and corrosive possibilities, is one of the important things that we work with. The AIC site that we are working with right now, they have a wonderful materials wiki which has Audi test results. It is a work in progress. It's sometimes a little frustrating to find things on, but it's well worth it. The materials need to be structurally sufficient for the task. There are sometimes that you can want to use one thing and realize that it just doesn't have the stiffness to provide the support, so we have to think of that in our choices. And then it has to be reasonably workable. It has to be available if you can't get something. It can't be really part of your toolkit, and part of that is cost. There are wonderful things. I've worked with medical plastics and stuff like that that are heat-formable, but they're just too extensive to be part of what we get to use. So these are all factors that we look at when we're choosing materials. So in speaking about materials and in speaking about those medical plastics, we as mountain makers are scouring the industrial realm for materials because there are all sorts of cool things out there. And so we look into our science and medicine industry and all these other places. The McMaster Car catalog is one of our valuable, huge catalogs for industrial goods. But there are some things that still come down that can be the standard materials that we use. And the first one of those is brass. Brass is just such a wonderful material. It's really quite easy to work with. It cuts with fairly standard tooling, drills easily. It has moderate strength. It's not super strong, but it's strong enough to do most of what we need to do. We join it with silver brazing alloys. You'll hear them referred to as silver solder. Soldiers are a low-temperature ally. Silver brazing is higher-temperature. But we're able to join it together with those like the mount that you see together. All of those connections are done with silver brazing alloys and a fairly straightforward torch system. And you can do amazing things with it. It's very forgiving to work with. And I just, after all these years, I just adore working with brass. It's great fun. Steel is what we use when we need higher strength. Any sorts of large mounts are almost all made of steel. And they can be silver brazed. But once we get to a certain point, those are fabricated with welding. It's more difficult to work with than brass because it's harder, so drilling, tapping, cutting are all more difficult, so it requires more specialized tooling. But the advantages are wonderful. And the other advantage is that it's actually quite a bit cheaper than brass. Brass is rather extensive. Sheet plastics, we use a variety of plastics in mount making. I personally don't use them as much as brass. I still find brass to be the overall winner. But when they're appropriate, they're great. They're a little lower strength, but they're fairly easy to work with. We can heat form most plastics. So they're suited to kind of particular uses. They're great for book mounts, and they're great for a lot of things. And they can be used in ways that we can really make very complex mounts. Acrylic plexiglass is what most people think of with plastic mounts. It can be as clear. It can be polished. It can be bent. It is really useful in many, many ways. Vivec is a softer plastic, which is out of the sign making industry. It's heat formable in a stretching. You can do a three-dimensional bend with it. Whereas acrylic, it's much harder to do anything other than a simple two-dimensional bend. Cintra is a board that most of you will know from mounting photos on it. It's a foamed PVC. Cintra brand board tends to pass ID tests, but a lot of the others do not. So it's something that we use just kind of in certain ways. And then Gator board is a foam core board with a phenolic reinforced paper exterior that's very hard. It's great for underlying other mounts for structural parts and a variety of things. It's a very useful board product. And then multiple epoxy putties are something that we use a lot. And so down in the circle, on the lower portion of the camel slide, that is a set up for making a base for that camel that has been laid down, and I photographed it before going and covering it with a plastic saran wrap or something like that and then squishing the camel down into it. And as you look at it, it's laid out as a series of strips or kind of little snakes of this epoxy putty. And that's because it's fairly viscous. And when we press the object into it, now the epoxy putty as it takes the shape of the underside of the object has some place to go. It has some place to squish, too. If that was a solid slab, it'd place much more pressure on the object. So we're working when we're using epoxy putty. We need to be very gentle in the pressure that we're applying to the object. And so by doing it in this fashion, we're able to give a very complete support but not stress the object. The horse on the right, if you look at the black line at the bottom of it, that is a shim of epoxy putty that's attached to a mount system like the seismic mount I showed earlier that goes up and into that horse. And it just gives this nice black line that has been trimmed and painted and it forms this great plastic base. Epoxy putties in general pass audit tests and are mostly considered appropriate in contact with objects. If we're working with a sensitive object, we'll often take a layer of B72 resin over it and just give it one isolation layer that way. Addings and barriers. We use a lot of padding. We want to be having padding on the metals or on the mount anytime it is in contact with the object when we're building the mount or when it's actually installed. So we use acrylic felts, suede polyethylene, or also known as ultra suede. Those are both things that are just in common use and are both available through benchmark. Benchmark is a mount making company and supplier that is in New Jersey. And excellent folks. They've been in the business for years. And the nice thing is they have felts and weighted polyethylene that are in strips, pre-cut, and those have all been auto-tested. So those are really good for if you're working with sensitive objects or in production having to pre-cut strips is really useful. Each shrink tubing will use a lot. There are PVC each shrink tubing which we do not use, but polyolefin is the most normal. And again, benchmarks each shrink tubing is more supple than others which sometimes when you're trying to put it onto the mount is really important. PTFE or Teflon tubing are a higher temperature each shrink but they are really nice. So these are tubings that are of a larger size that you slide over something and then you heat with a heat gun and they shrink down and grip the piece of rod or whatever you're putting it over. Molari is a fuse service polyethylene foam. I like to use it for bench padding but then also for padding mounts. Paralloy B72, you probably all know it from its uses. Varnishes, it's used as coatings, it's also in pick form, it's used as matices. 3M415 and 465 are pressure-sensitive matices that we often put on fabrics to make them adhere and so those are really nice. And with all these things I have to totally give you the question that current audio testing is really necessary when you're using things with sensitive materials as all these are commercial products and the formulations do change and so we need to just always keep aware of it. The Audi testing, the MEPC has been doing a large Audi testing program right now and so I'm really hoping that it all kind of stabilizes. We use lots of foams, fabrics at the foam, again, volara, polyester batting, stockinette is really useful for covering things, stretch knits like are covering those hat mounts. It should be washed first but otherwise, again, it's generally really good. Ultra suede, I just love how ultra suede works so there's a whole range of things that we use in that. I want to talk a little bit about the Mountmaking Workshop and our ways of working. This is a picture of Mountmaking Focus Studio set up for one of the workshops. I feel that the object deserves a defined clean zone on the workbench and so this, I've put down a layer of volara that is fresh and clean and I put it down with blue tape to define this zone that belongs to the object. We then have foam blocking or tubes of Tyvek with peanuts, foam peanuts or even sand or something in it so that you have things that you can block up the object with. Those two pieces of foam pipe insulation that are there next to the mask, they have a nice smooth surface and they help keep the horns on that up off of the bench when I flip that over and it gives me a nice careful support so when I go to measure and template it, it's nice and stable. The tools and supplies that I'm working with, they stay on the bench itself and having this blue tape line gives me this visual thing of that's the object zone, things don't go there. We also don't tend to, when we're picking up tools, we don't ever want them to go over the object just because we do drop things. So if they're going from one side to the other, they always try to go around the blue zone. Gloves are an important part of mount making and I've come to have the preference for using nitrile-palmed knit gloves for object handling. Specifically like these, Shoah or Atlas brand number 370 White Assembly Gloves. They have a fused nitrile palm and a knit back. Your hands don't sweat in them and the thing about them is they're easy to take on and off and we all know working with disposable nitrile gloves that you pull them off and your hands are awful. They're all yucky and you don't want to touch anything with them. So the biggest problem is in mount making is that we're going back and forth from working with the object to then working with the metal, working with the tools, working with machines. And what this brings up is it's a great opportunity for cross-contamination of getting up and not wanting to take your gloves off and oh, I'll just drill a hole, but there's only a little bit of oil on the drill press and you don't notice it and you come back and we've now contaminated the object with just a little bit of oil. With the nitrile palm knit gloves, it's easy to take them off and go to the machine with our bare hands or with another set of gloves that we put on to go do that work. And the gloves come off and they go down on the white, Malara, they stay within the object zone. So once again, we're keeping kind of this object zone at both what's on our hands, what's on the bench. The nice thing about these gloves is that they're washable for many re-uses. I'll wash them up to eight or ten times before the palms start to harden. There will be a certain point where you'll notice they'll start losing their grip. They'll also get stained a little bit, but overall, they really have a great ability to be used again and again and again. I buy them in bulk, keep them, and whenever I see contamination on them, I switch to a new pair and those go into the batch to be wandered. So here's my old hound dog, I had a heading looking for essential tools for mouth-making. I had to put her in just for a little comic relief. We use a lot of hand-tooled pliers. I have more types of pliers than anybody you know, and they are the extensions of my hands and holding on to metal and bending things. It just is really, you work through and you find all these things that you gradually get to know. Files, cutting tools are all part of it. We have templating tools. We have flexible curves and contour gauges. So here I'm taking a contour of the inside of that mask that I was showing earlier. I'm then also using a two-ply mat board to use as a way of visualizing the mouth. So I'll go and I'll take that piece of mat board and I'll lay it down inside the mask. And one of the things I'm doing with it, besides just giving myself a tool for visualizing the mouth, I'm using it as I lay across these odd shapes and it helps me find where there's a simple path. There's a two-dimensional curve, not a complex curve. And that's one of the things when we're working with flat stock in brass mouth making that we want to find simple curves as opposed to complex curves so that we keep the level of complexity of the mouth to a minimum. So the mat board assists with that. It also is an empirical measurement tool. I can go and lay it across. And like you can see on that bottom cross piece of mat board, the ends are cut at an angle. Those are the angles of the edge of the mask and those are what I'm going to join my next retaining mechanisms to. And they may either screw on or they may be silver braids directly onto that. I'll take that flexible curve and I'll chart the curve of that upper one and then I'll go to a piece of graph paper and I will trace that curve onto the graph paper labeling it right, properly left and that then gives me the ability to take my metal and bend it to that curve and not to the inside of the mask. These are techniques that are especially important when we are working with an object that we have to template the object and then go away to another shop to be able to actually work and build the mount. Because sometimes we're able to work with the object on our bench. Sometimes we have to go and chart and design the mount in collections and leave the object in collections and then go to the shop and work on it there. So the mountboard templating is just the way that I've worked out to be able to do those things and it's a really useful technique for me. So as far as stationary tools, the Ribbon Sander is really the one tool that I just find I can almost not do without. So this is a one inch belt by 42 inch long for this large one and an eight inch disc and this is useful for cleaning up the end of a piece of brass or the edge of a piece of plexiglass or kind of all these different things where we want to go and crew up a surface. That belt has a metal platen in the lower half of it so we get a nice hard surface there but then it isn't supported in the upper surface so that we can kind of round things up there. It's a great way to do the rounding for the final finish on it. The bandsaw is used to cut things to length, cut shapes out and is a very versatile saw. This one specifically is really nice because it's a two speed saw that has a very slow speed for cutting steel and that's something that I've wanted for years and finally was able to find an auction. You'll also notice next to the sander there is a vacuum cleaner and that vacuum is set up on the sander both to exhaust the dust from the sander but it's actually connected in such a way that this is a vacuum equipped with a relay so that when you turn on the sander it turns on the vacuum and then the vacuum stays on for another couple of seconds after the sander is turned off to evacuate the hose. This is made by Fine at the IN. It's a German company and they're wonderful. Wheel press is another thing that just helps so much. You want to have it with a vise on there to control the metal especially but drilling precision holes, you want to drill press to the right is a milling machine which is like a drill press on steroids with a movable table and this is a small really wonderful milling machine and I use it for slotting and for other precision drilling lots of things. It is a great tool. Fire tables for the classes I have two and they are equipped with an evacuation system over it so that the fumes from the flame and from the flux especially are drawn away from the person and this situation just goes out a window but it just takes it away from the operator. The torches on the right are what I use. The yellow torch is a very common plumbing torch. It is a Burns-O-Matic or this one is a Shurefire brand. They are a trigger start plumbing torch that uses map gas which is a proprietary gas mixture that comes in yellow canister. These are available at most hardware stores in the U.S. and they're about $60 for an outfit. They are very hot. I can actually, especially with two of these, I can silver brace quarter inch steel but you'll find one of those. We'll do all the silver brazing on breath that you can imagine. It is a fairly large physical flame and so it takes a little bit of work to get to know it but there's a learning curve on that. The other one is an oxygen and fuel torch called a Niko Midget which is a lovely little torch. I'm using it with propane as my fuel. That is a very hot torch and a very precise flame. It has multiple tips that you can really tailor to what you want. This is a Dual-Mite Bender Oxford General Industries. It has a clamp that holds the breath and then a lever arm that you're able to make really nice bends. You can see on the right that it is 1 inch by 8 inch steel that I'm cold bending with it and can do very precise and repeatable bends. There are a whole series of mandrels so you can bend in all sorts of different sizes and lots of different attachments. It's an excellent tool. They're on the expensive side. There is a Chinese knockoff of it that I keep and talk about because it's the direct theft of the technology. This is a good place for pulling the torch. I'm not paying attention to my poles. The final things that I really feel we need in the shop are machine advice. A lot of times you really need to hold onto the material for drilling and tapping and things. Then on the right we have a heat gun which we need for shrinking heat, shrink tubing, but also for bending the acrylic. The components of the mount-making process, really mount-making starts with object assessment. We have to look at the conditions of the object, structural integrity, where the weight in the center of gravity are and what the physical size is and the opportunities that that object gives us. Condition, the structural integrity, we're looking at fugitive surfaces, pigments, fragile edges, inherent weaknesses of the object. Then what the overall integrity is, how much are we going to have to support this? What is the robustness of the object itself? What do we need to provide? We need to estimate the weight. This is a sandstone jolly from Mughal India that I just worked on. It had broken and we needed to repair it and then support it, so we needed to estimate the weight of it. What I did was look at, try to figure out how much cubic material there was, so multiply the width and depth of the whole frame area and figure out how much cubic material there was in that and then look at the interior lattice and do the area of that and then multiply it. I did by 35%, which is what I figured was how much stone there was in there and then add those two together to get a cubic layer of how much material there is and then I multiplied that by the material weight of 145 pounds per cubic foot, which is what sandstone is, things like granite and stuff I usually think of as 160. But that gave me a figure of about 200 pounds for that and that's what we needed to know because we were going to be picking it up and everything else. Where is the center of gravity and what is the balance of the object? This is a template of that copper that I showed earlier and the distribution, it's wider at the top, it's denser at the top and so the center of gravity is where I put that cross. It's up higher. That's where I'm going to need to attach the mount to it and I want to attach the mount just above the center of gravity so that there is more weight below it. You get pendulous weight and it makes it all stable. The closer to the center of gravity we are, the more you are able to rotate it and the weight stays even. But this center of gravity is something that we really need to look at and most of the time when we're working with objects, they're a size that we can pick up but a lot of times you're estimating where that is and then the size and actual weight of the object are what are going to determine the strength and stiffness of the structure that's holding it up. So this copper has a really large socket on the back wall and a piece of, I think, one inch stock that is the post that is holding it to the wall and then a large socket on the back of the mount. So all of those things were determined by how heavy the object was. Often with a heavier object you also want to use two posts and so those are the decisions that we're making when we're planning our mount. And then we want to look at the opportunities. This is a dodo bird circus wagon ornament and it happened to have a whole mounting system from when it was on the circus wagon and so we were able to use some of those holes and the things that were already attached because they were nice and sound and really well seated. But a lot of the time we're looking for where can we reach around it, where can we take the weight of the object and then we need to identify a method to capture that object and so a set of retainers or grabbers that come around the top and they have to be in opposition to that thing on the other side, that weight bearing below you can oppose with the grabber above so the object can't kind of sneak out of the mount. And then sufficient contacts are important for proper support. So a lot of mounts are made from round stock whether it's rod or wire. This is best for things that are lighter or are very sturdy because a round contour like that has just one line of contact. It doesn't have a great area to spread load. I tend to like flat stock for my mounts because it has a greater bearing surface that the load can fall on, but they're both really useful. Round stock is nice because you can bend it in multiple directions really easily where flat stock really is best for simple dimensional contour, simple bend. I throw this in because this is a mask but I just saw it is, sadly, it has insufficient surface area and it isn't very good and I just made me notice it. Obviously from all the insect damage it's a very compromised piece but there in the circle you can see one of the two prongs that take all the weight and that prong isn't contacting except it's back on the very corner. I would be worried that when this would come off display there'd be a very small dent back there from taking that weight. Luckily it's a fairly light object so it still may be okay but if that prong was bent up just a little bit it now would be in contact and you would get much more weight bearing out of it. You also wouldn't notice it nearly as much because you see that space between the prong and the object and it makes you notice it. Receiver systems are something that I've actually written on for the Journal of the American Civil Conservation and receiver systems are just some sort of fitting that can go on the mount that then makes to the support structure that goes to the deck or to the wall and the nice thing is that a receiver allows you different ways of installing the object with the socket that is in the middle of this mask mount. I can install this on a post going down to the deck or I can have a post coming back to the wall with a slight upward turn that that socket's onto and then there's a set screw an Allen headed screw that tightened against the post and firms up that connection. The nice thing about it is that by not having a post on it it has to be put into the wall with the mount on it. We aren't putting the object onto the mount while it's in position in the case and having to actually have some little screw or do something. And we're not having to put the post into the wall while the object is on the mount and I've seen that many a time. This allows us to put the mount onto the object on a nice padded bench where we have control of everything, put the connecting post to the wall or to the deck and then bring the two together and easily put them together actually the set screw and everything is nice and secure. Ideally what I want is I'll put that post in the deck I'll be able to bring the object over to it connect it to it and without even tightening the set screw I can take my hands away because it is stable it is not going to fall over and then I tighten the set screw and it makes it all firm and solid. So this is a method that I have come to really believe in as being a major safety method when it comes to installation. The other thing about it is that not only does it make your installation easier it makes de-installation very fast and this is important in an emergency situation. I've been watching the fires in California and I would think that if I had a fire coming at my museum well one, you save yourself people first but having receiver systems to be able to de-install really precious things would be really useful. And then there's aesthetic tactics we want to work in the visual shadow put things behind the object make it so that we really can't see what all is going on give things slippery shapes I like to make the ends of my my mount holders that are in the visual zone to be kind of rounded so that the eye slides off and we work to harmonize those pieces with the contours of the object and then I'll usually paint the mount to be a neutral color that will go with the object so that it doesn't draw the eye I don't favor painting out the object to where it is like if there's a stripe on the object I don't paint a stripe on the mount because I don't want it to be mistaken for a part of the object I just want you to just look at it and go oh yeah that's the mount and look at the object so that's where I say it's better to be a matter of fact than a little too tricky on your mount this is a quick case study of the Yupik whale mask here we go and we assess the weight and balance the condition, the desired position and the aesthetics, the opportunities and then the needs of the object here I show the templating with the matte board we take contours with the software rulers profile gauges again we try to work with simple curves the matte board has shown me where I can lay down those curves where I'm not getting a twist I want the design path to be as simple and as straightforward as possible and then I'm looking ahead for what I'm going to need to do so like the two vertical members on the sides those are there so that I can attach the pieces that will hold up the little flippers in hand then I build the center part and then we go and build and connect the exterior grabbers again we build from the matte board template we confirm the contours as we go and bend any time that the metal is going to come in contact with the object to confirm a curve it has to be padded and I always walk around and try to let my fingers feel the amount and make sure there aren't any sharp edges I want to just make it so that I just don't have the possibility of scarring the object I don't bend metal walls in contact with the object and this is the problem with like T-mounts and stuff people tend to bend them around an object I've seen denting, I've seen scraping so just a rule you don't bend metal walls in contact with the object and then we design the additional elements as they're needed and here there's a holder for the little beluga whale that's being eaten by the larger whale and that goes on with the screw and there's the quill or the fin and hand holders to support those original quill attachments and so we've got the happy whale and this might be a good time for the third poll Have you ever built an object mount before? And then finally I want to give a quick word on mount documentation and this is something that doesn't happen enough but mounts are often installed as a person other than the mount maker and they also often require a specific sequence of assembly the main part goes in with a little twist and a little go around and what we've realized is that in the days now of cell phone cameras and everything ideally if we take just a a 10-20 second flip of how this goes together that could actually be downloaded and included in the accession records for use in future installation or just in the installation of the object more and more we see there being an iPad or a Microsoft Surface or something else it's part of the installation process and this would be really useful also just a basic paper template of the object just the footprint visually that can be taped to the wall that we can say okay there's where the post goes that facilitates the installation it's also a good place to put person in detail on and that can be included with the mount so mount documentation is something well worth doing few final mount examples this is actually a plexiglass based mount that holds the octopus bag and it goes down to the support post it's holding up the the ermine parka this is Alaska State Museum acrylic blade with nylon line it's just a very simple stabilizer for the vessel on the left on the right there's a dual bladed support mount that is really a much better capture and is truly a seismic stabilization measure here we've got again this acrylic mount for this very high gloss object on an offset base and this is a real example of how you're harmonizing the material with the material of the object the brightness of the the light gathering of the plexiglass doesn't work well with dull objects but with a shiny object it gets lost in the shine the other thing I like is that the offset base this associates that support from the object it lets the object come forward and you get a real emphasis of the object here's a subtle support it's hard to see but it runs up from the base up along the rim of the bucket up in the left hand support to the top and hooks that top handle and this holds the handle up which would flop down and takes a little bit of weight but gives it a really nice aesthetic without showing very much so this is both preservation and aesthetic effect our hat mounts with carved out the foam and batting with fabric covering are a real normal thing I have included in the handout a very new design for a hat mount from Becky Dunin who is a conservator in the Netherlands that was just presented at the mount making forum in London that uses stockinette stuffed with polyester batting and then red that's gone through around that can be tightened and change the shape and the size of it it's a groundbreaking mount look at those and think about that sort of way of building mounts and what we can do with it because you are all going to be part of building the next wave of mounts here's a texel mount using magnets that are embedded in a gator foam board that mounts the wall on the right the two black lines those are the gator foam and magnet board the steel goes on the front of the object the magnets go on the back it gives a very even support to the object it pinches it along a great length of it and the nice thing is it's very easy to put up and easy to take down very kind of the object and occasionally we get mounts that imitate art this is one I did a number of years ago for this Moche Peruse ceramic vessel it's great fun to have it and I still it's the most sculptural thing I've probably ever made and with that we finish this thank you for participating and now we can talk about the questions that have come up and so I'm looking in the parking lot of questions and one is do I know a good source of archival gray black at the foam and I do not I have gotten at the foam from a local packaging place that is black and I have no idea if it's archival Rebecca Fury asks can you explain more about how I attach the support to the back of the whale mask the back of the whale mask has a socket that is braised on that is a 3.8 inch outside diameter socket or piece of brass tubing that has an 0.49 inch wall which the secret to that is it's under a 16th of an inch so that the under dimension is slightly larger than a quarter inch so the 0.49 wall tubings are kind of my secret for receivers it gives you that ability to have a nice socket that a standard size post will fit in and just enough room for the set screw to actuate the jumping horse at the beginning was attached with two very simple posts that was a very early mount actually in my clear the cost of making mounts is hard to kind of talk about because it's really kind of an experience thing as to how fast you can do it it's a time of building mounts can be difficult materials I don't find are all that expensive in building mounts because we don't use that much but that's a hard one to answer I don't really have a good thing for that a good answer for you on that Rebecca Landau Hernandez have never done on the receiver systems and disaster recovery no I haven't sounds like it would be a great idea because I feel that it's a really useful useful thing the article that I wrote on receivers was part of a special issue of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation and I've been meaning to put it up on my website which is mountmakingfocus alloneword.com and I will try to get that onto the website over the next week because it's a worthwhile article to read the entire special issue on mountmaking is currently in the process of trying to be put online through the I believe the wiki site as the foundation of the AIC Shelly Uller who is the mountmaker from the Museum of the American Indian has talked about working on that so we will see if that gets out there pretty soon. Jamie I'm not sure if you answered the second part of Lauren's question but did you ever reuse mounts or parts of mounts for different objects? Thank you. So I didn't answer very much the second half of Lauren Poston's question on reusing mounts mounts are very individual things. There are some things that are standard enough that you have mounts that are made for say plates or we had an entire mount system that we made for garments like kimonos when we were at Seattle Art Museum and those are easy to reuse. Reusing materials I have cut up old mounts and repurposed them just to save materials but as far as reusing the actual mount it really depends on how custom that mount has to be made to the individual object so it can be done but it's definitely somewhat it's a very individual sort of thing to be able to reuse a mount. Now the support systems the posts and everything are definitely reused and once a mount is made for an object it should be part of the basically what goes with the object because there's no point in ever remaking a mount that is well done. So I know at Seattle Art Museum in the session records a field for not only the location of the object but the location of the mount and that I feel is really important. Jamie and I also would make a comment it's something I've always kind of understood being coming from background packing. It seems like mountmaking has a lot of similarities to just basic packing when it comes to selecting strong points of contact to an object, providing support and protection against vibration it just seems like it's a more in-depth kind of in-tune process but a very similar process to what a packer does to handle an object. I think that's very true. All of these things whether it's the handling the packing the transport they're all really looking at the object in what its needs are how much support this needs and where can we grab it and mountmaking is kind of the aesthetic end of it and of course we have storage mounts that don't need to look pretty and then we have the mounts that we're putting on display that we want to be more discreet but they all still have to follow the same set of protocols as to holding on gently taking care of this thing for traveling exhibits there are definitely things that we'll do slightly different if and this is where the receivers again come into their own to be able to use the mount in a variety of different fashions we have built mounts that have actually become part of the securing of the object in the shipping system this can work very well but it also and transmit more vibration to the object so it's something that we use in a very advised manner but you know this is where I like to emphasize that amount is an idea amount is a set of criteria that we're working meet and that we're able to put in all sorts of purposes into our mount making and so I'm really happy to be able to kind of spread the gospel of mount making as it is to be able to just harness the brain power of all of you I hope that this has given you a little look and that you're fascinated with it because to me this is a professional puzzle solving discipline in our in our work life and I just I really enjoy it I have actually just taken a job with the acidic studios which is commercial operation that is doing the exhibits for the Burke Museum so I'm going to be building mounts for the Burke collection over the past over the next about 8 months and so I won't be doing as many workshops during that time but I should still be doing some you can keep track of them by going to the website mountmakingfocus.com and the announcements should be there there is one workshop coming up December 4th through 7th that still has a couple of places in it and you can check it out there you also mentioned the go ahead Susan I'm going to put up the evaluation link this is the evaluation for the whole course and we'd really appreciate it if you liked the time and fill it out I'll also post it in the education website but please fill it out they're very important to us we learn a lot from them what I was going to say was you mentioned earlier Jamie the international mountain making forum they just had it in London September but every other year they have it in the US the mountain making forum is a every other year conference that started first one is at the at the Getty second was at the Smithsonian third was at the Field Museum the one in London that happened in September was the first time it has gone outside of the US it is possible that the next one could be I think the next one is probably going to be back in the US there's possibilities of Salt Lake City and so we'll try to get announcements out for that the pack-in forum is an excellent place for announcements of that also there is a mountain making forum online which is I think the Google group and I can try to get links to that I do want to also look and answer Tom Doyle's question have you ever used wood for making the basic amount in a case I believe that birch wood is sometimes used since it does not off-gas as much wood can be used wood is not used really as a mountain making material all that much because all wood products do give off organic acids but it is an appropriate thing at time birch is an excellent wood because it is very dry has very little in the way of extractives that are part of it poplar would be another one that is used in that way and alder is also quite dry but overall we don't tend to use it very much although casework is still made mostly of like metite 2 which is a formaldehyde free of bored material but as the adi tests become more and more important we continue to go away from wood products in exhibits at all and so it hasn't been really a part of mountain making for quite a while I just want to remind you of a couple of things I need to get all of your assignments by November 26 and if you're not going to you're not aiming to get the credly badge it doesn't matter and I may contact some people to ask them if that's their intention is to not do anything which is fine I'll also see if I can get the FAIC receiver systems article and I'll post it in the handouts if I can and I'll see if I can post the special issue on mounts and what else ah we have two upcoming free webinars in connecting to collections care in two weeks there's one on plastics and caring for plastics it might be of interest and in the middle of December we have one on creating objects so that should be of interest to you too so go to our website you can click on the picture in the in the slides that roll by and you can sign up and that'd be fine those are free are there any more questions I want to say thank you for participating in this course we really appreciate it this is the first time we've done a course and so we've been happy with how it's gone and I want to thank Mark who's been my comrade in doing this as the course coordinator and I want to thank Jamie for giving a lovely talk today and I believe and I will check this out that if you're registered for this course that you have access to webinars and stuff as much as you want and I'll make sure that that's the case and if it is I will let you know and I think that's it do you have anything to say Mark or Jamie just thank Jamie for a wonderful presentation today as well as all the other speakers that we've had the last couple of weeks it's been I think a very in depth for the various topics and I hope everybody appreciated the amount of information and resources that people provided to you and I hope that benefits you and your role and your institution that's what it's all about and I'd like to thank Susan and AIC for inviting all this this has been a great opportunity they have a pool of some really talented people together to be able to share their knowledge in a given field so thank you Susan thank you and we really appreciate being able to partner with Packin that's been really wonderful for us so thank you you're welcome we want to thank Mike Morneau he's been our producer he's faithful they're behind the scenes making sure everything goes well and we want to thank him but please fill out the evaluation form and as I said I will try to post it also in the education website so that you can if you don't get it here you can get it there and remember November 26 we turn into pumpkins and so have a nice Thanksgiving and thank you very much and we hope that you'll join us in some of our free webinars we're going to have some courses next year there's going to be one on storage New York program probably we also have some things coming up next year on microclimates that will be in January so keep an eye on the website find things and we also have lots and lots of resources on our website so you can always go there so thank you very much bye bye thank you all I've really enjoyed working with you and thanks for all