by Robert
Last week, Neile was off to western Pennsylvania to teach a class at Touchstone Center for the Arts, so I was able to take over the entire studio. It sure was nice to have so much workspace to myself - when this space was my old garage, it was always too cluttered to actually work in.
As you can see above, the studio is looking pretty good, except for that nasty old garage door. We’ll soon replace it with a double door of glass panels, sized to fit the Makers Mark panels (12 at a time), so that we can check the continuity of the separate panels. With the help of Mark next door, we’ll construct a steel skeleton for the doors. Thus, I began the week mitering and grinding 48 pieces of 1” angle steel to exactly 22 inches each, so that Mark will have an “easy” time welding them into perfect squares for the door.
I started off the week by photographing all of the new panels that had been completed since my last photography session. I then added those photos to the master scale drawing.
All panels completed and photographed through column 11!
With that task done, I moved on to Crates 2.0. My first attempt at building crates taught me that we’d need to have FAR smaller containers in order to protect the finished glass. Plus, I had built Frankenstein monstrosities, as I tried to use only reclaimed pallet wood, and it might be nice to deliver these beautiful panels in more refined packaging. So, I supplemented pallet wood with some store bought lumber and came up with something a bit nicer. The old crates have been coming in handy, though, to hold the bulk of the panels that the studio workers have been crafting at a great pace.
With that complete, I spent some time making canvas panels to hide the storage under the workbenches. Previously, I had used grommets to hold the canvas up (I thought it was pretty cool to have a grommet tool), but that solution was messy, and now things look much neater, as you can see in the photo above.
As I was finishing up all of these tasks, I received a photo from Mark, showing me that he had tack welded the first batch of squares together. Looks like next week will include prepping the rough opening for the new garage door!
