Recently I posted a heading entitled “Boxes”. In the article I detail just how challenging but rewarding that I find box making to be. I have since reviewed the article and find that it describes my “why” clearly and can add nothing meaningful to it. This must mean that it is time to address some of my clients reasons to desire and commission different kinds of boxes. Their “why”, if you will.
Sculpture to Go
Here is a box need that you don’t see often. One of my clients was a patron of a local lady ceramicist/sculptor whose works tended toward the monumental. When my client decided to relocate from St. Louis to a remote location in Colorado, she was unwilling to abandon her installed sculptures. She asked if I might be able to demount and crate them for transport to Colorado via truck freight. Since I had no idea of the difficulty of this task, I was certain that I could accomplish it with dispatch. It actually did work out well, arriving intact in Colorado.
Space Shot
This one is text only, as no photos exist. During my former professional lifetime as a General Contractor, I executed several projects for local museums, most of these being garden variety contracting jobs like revamping display areas. One day I received a request for bid (RFB) to crate a Mercury space capsule for transport. The situation was that the capsule was loaned, for purposes of display, to my local museum for a finite period of time. The end of that time period was at hand and the original crate material could not be located. Again, there is no story here unless I had been sure that I could efficiently create such a crate. It was interesting work with drawings and specifications from BOTH museums.
The capsule was transported without incident, leaving me with just two regrets. The first was that I was enjoined from photographing the process, my museum citing “Security Concerns.” I remember thinking “Really? Someone is going to steal a twenty-five-year-old space capsule and initiate their own lunar travel project?” The other was that I was never able to figure out how to state my new qualifications succinctly. Think business card, as in “Period Interplanetary Vehicle Transport Specialist”(PIVTS). I’m sure that you see the problem.