jwilliams
04-17-2017, 12:09 PM
My wife tells a story from when she was little; one morning she was dashing out the door late for school, and turned around to her mom and shouted "QUICK! I need a hard-boiled egg!" We use this phrase often when something urgent, but forgotten, suddenly emerges.
I experienced this during my most recent installation, when I realized that I had forgotten to include making bookmounts for several vintage magazines into my schedule. Suddenly, I needed to figure out how to recover and make 10 bookmounts as quickly and efficiently as possible, while maintaining museum standards and looking reasonably well made. I initially planned to use archival corrugated, but as I was working out a prototype, I thought about adhesives and other issues that would involve, and it hit me that I had some Sintra on hand, and that it is an easily workable thermoplastic that is archival and nice-looking. I rethought my prototype, and quickly imagined a process where I could easily create a least-common-denominator size mount that would work for all the books, the set to manufacturing the quantity I needed. My older, craft-level heat bending strip was perfect for the job. Total time from concept to execution: 90 minutes.
While these were far from perfect, they serve their purpose and look pretty good. In hindsight, I'd make better jigs to keep the folding more consistent, and more time would be spent cleaning edges up and just prettying them up. As I installed them into the cases, they sometimes needed a little tweak using a heat gun to get the best position, and some required screws to fix them in the cases as they didn't quite balance.
Here's a timelapse video of the process.
https://youtu.be/PuaIeom_hgk Photos and descriptions below.
I experienced this during my most recent installation, when I realized that I had forgotten to include making bookmounts for several vintage magazines into my schedule. Suddenly, I needed to figure out how to recover and make 10 bookmounts as quickly and efficiently as possible, while maintaining museum standards and looking reasonably well made. I initially planned to use archival corrugated, but as I was working out a prototype, I thought about adhesives and other issues that would involve, and it hit me that I had some Sintra on hand, and that it is an easily workable thermoplastic that is archival and nice-looking. I rethought my prototype, and quickly imagined a process where I could easily create a least-common-denominator size mount that would work for all the books, the set to manufacturing the quantity I needed. My older, craft-level heat bending strip was perfect for the job. Total time from concept to execution: 90 minutes.
While these were far from perfect, they serve their purpose and look pretty good. In hindsight, I'd make better jigs to keep the folding more consistent, and more time would be spent cleaning edges up and just prettying them up. As I installed them into the cases, they sometimes needed a little tweak using a heat gun to get the best position, and some required screws to fix them in the cases as they didn't quite balance.
Here's a timelapse video of the process.
https://youtu.be/PuaIeom_hgk Photos and descriptions below.