Crate Expectations

Journal entry for 19 Aug 2011 | Link

Problem

Six oil-primed canvases need to go from Boston to Northeast Harbor, Maine, a six-hour drive, and from there to Great Cranberry Isle, which is accessible only by boat. In 23 days they need to go back with wet oil paintings on them. Crating them individually will be expensive and time-consuming, but crating them together will make them impossible for one person (me) to lift.

Solution

Cut six sheets of quarter-inch luan a little bigger than the canvases, and screw and glue 2x3 studs along the short sides. Select a front and a back piece (see parenthetical below), then drill four half-inch holes to accommodate a 3/8-inch rope, knotted at each end, one length per hole. Screw two-inch mending plates into the stretcher bars of each canvas at four points, leaving enough looseness to rotate them. Drill holes in the luan and hang the canvases on them with bolts and wingnuts. Stack the sleeved canvases face-to-back except for the last one, which goes face-to-face. (Think about this before you drill the holes for the rope.) Stretch-wrap the whole shebang. Tie the lengths of rope together on each side into a proper square knot to serve as handles. Deliver to destination, cut the stretch wrap, untie the knots, unbolt the canvases, rotate the mending plates out of the way, and serve at room temperature with a mature Cabernet.

Analysis of Results

Bolting in the canvases caused the luan to bow enough to prevent the studs from stacking as cleanly as I would have liked. Stretch-wrapping caused them to bow even further. Studs along the long sides would have prevented this, but it would have added a lot of weight. I could lift the final package, barely, and move it about six feet at a time. I ended up taking the hand truck with me in the car to ensure that I could deliver my stuff wherever it needed to go, and it would have been a big problem if I hadn't. By the time I got to the boat, I wondered if I should have built a proper crate, but the savings of construction time and materials were worth it. The cost difference was easily the price of the hand truck, and the fact that I was in bed by 10:30 the night before the trip, and not up until 2 AM packing, was something of a personal triumph.

The six-hour drive and the move to the roof of the Beal & Bunker Mail Boat loosened the stretch wrap enough to allow the stack to come apart in the middle, putting luan against the short edge of one of the canvases. This necessitated my clambering up on the boat roof and, with two crew members, shuffling the sleeves back and forth to get them stacked up again. I was grateful that I had put in those rope handles. In preparation for the trip back, I plan to stretch-wrap the stacked sleeves to within an inch of their lives. My worry that the bowing luan would warp the canvases seems not to have come to pass.

In the end this semi-crate was neither as easy to lift nor as sturdy as I envisioned. But the canvases survived the trip, and lifting it with a friend, in this case a strapping young Mainer in the employ of Beal & Bunker, was an easy job.

Improvements

Two strips of lattice along each side of the stacked studs, with screws running into each sleeve, would have solidified the whole arrangement and not added much weight, although taking them apart at the other end would have required unscrewing 24 screws, and the bowing might have made both assembly and reassembly of this little addition an irritating chore. It also occurred to me to cut a groove into each sleeve, maybe a quarter-inch deep, along the end of each stud, then tie each side up with baling wire. If my jigsaw didn't tend to botch cuts like that or I was willing to run thought-provoking (read: potentially decapitating) experiments with my circular saw, I would have considered it. The right tool for that job would have been a bandsaw. Maybe one day I'll own one.

Magical Addendum

Looking to get away from the 3:4 canvases I usually paint on, I decided to go 22 by 36 inches. This is φ. (Close enough to it, anyway. Nothing is exactly φ or any other irrational number.) I don't subscribe to every claim made for the golden ratio but I have to admit that it's an especially nice rectangle, so maybe there's something to it all.