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I should have taken the offer of becoming a plumber! At the age of about 20 a neighbor who had no sons wanted me to become a plumber and work in his contractor business. I probally would have retired by now.
Isn't the grass greener on the other side of the road.
I had vowed to carry this secret to the grave, but now with this newly discovered forum out of country, so to speak, I feel that confession should cleanse my soul. (I still have recurring dreams of angry peasants with pitchforks and flaming torches demanding that I be drawn and quartered.)
About 20 years ago, two representatives from a local school committee approached me about framing a letter and a photograph (and some other small memorabilia) from an alumnus who had been invited to speak at their commencement ceremony. He was unable to attend but sent a letter of apology and best wishes for the graduating class, and a photo he had signed with a gold ink/paint pen.
I knew that the graduation ceremony would be covered by a local newspaper and the frame would be included in the photos that would be published. I had only been in business for a year or so, and viewed this as a great opportunity to garner name recognition for the shop.
The photo was on standard glossy Kodak paper. It had been previously dry mounted, but very poorly. Simply by flexing the mat board substrate, the photo popped right off. The residual dry mount tissue was so sparse and dry that is was easily removed by a dull putty knife.
Since it had previously been dry mounted, why not do it again, I figured? The photo was glossy, so I knew enough that I would need a ColorMount Glossy Cover Sheet. No problem! I knew I would have to pre-dry the photo and the new foam board. No problem! (Okay, so you know where this is going.)
I placed the photo face down on the cover sheet into the preheated press for about 45” then carefully slid it out and let it cool for a minute. When I lifted the photo up, lo and behold, the signature was gone! Not just blotchy, but completely gone. Ah, but no, there it is! On the glossy cover sheet was a perfect mirror image of the autograph.
The photo was the very first image of the earth taken by Allen Shepherd, the very first American to be sent into space. He is, as you can imagine, a local hero. (I deliberately misspelled his name to hide from search engines.)
The old cliché about weak knees and butterflies in your stomach does not come close to the panic I was experiencing. I felt like my ankles were missing and a badger was gnawing my intestines. I sat at my desk immobile for a good thirty minutes with sweat oozing from every pore in my body.
When I finally recovered, I knew I had to try to replace the signed photo, but I didn’t know how. (This was way before the internet). I called the local historical society and spoke to a woman who believed that this astronaut had moved to Dallas, Texas, and was now a real estate magnate.
I spent several hours taking to dozens of people with strange accents trying to find him. Through pure luck, I found his office and dialed the number hoping that I could throw myself at his mercy and recreate the photo. Unfortunately, his secretary stated that he was on a hunting trip in Wyoming or Montana and the cabin so remote that it did not have electricity or phones (this was way before mobile phones the number for which the secretary wouldn’t have given me anyway). She mentioned rather unctuously that this astronaut was in the company of the then Vice President of the United States, George H. W. Bush (the father of the current President).
I was doomed! Word of this framing disaster would put me out of business for sure. I only had ten days before I had to deliver this framing and I knew I was lost. My new business … poof!
I mentioned this a friend of mine who is a brilliant graphic artist. He wasn’t too encouraging, but, since I had nothing to lose, he agreed to try to help. He showed up with a series of very fine brushes and gold paint and began to restore the signature to the photo using the mirrored image still on the ColorMount Cover Sheet. It took him about 4 hours to faithfully reproduce it, but when the cover sheet was held up to the light, it was perfect!
This time I mounted the photo using PMA.
The frame occupies a prominent place in the lobby of the high school which commissioned the piece. But, I get the shakes every time I see the counterfeit signature.
Don't take life so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent! – Porky Pine
My glass is stored in a rack partly behind the System 400. All I have to do is grab a sheet of glass, lift it forward two inches and lower it on to the system 400 and slide it into position for cutting. To save space the glass is stored in the portrait orientation and more often than not I turn the glass around to landscape orientation.
Well the phone was ringing and somebody was coming into the shop and my brain was working out what to do next, with the result that the corner of the glass took a lump out of the vertical aluminium extrusion just where the nylon bearing needs to run. Oh s......
Having sandpapered off the nasty burr to make it run smooth again, it is still usable, but I'm not too sure if it's gonna mess up the nylon bearing.
sounds like a close call there NYAF, i'd perhaps phone up Keencut and ask them if such damage to a system4000 matters. They are well built so i can't see it having too detrimental an effect.
is your workshop too small to store your lass separately elsewhere?i know the space behind your SYS4000 is too tempting, and believe me we store all manner of junk sheet materials behind ours, but its not neccesarily the safest place for your glass.
Grahame Case wrote:sounds like a close call there NYAF, i'd perhaps phone up Keencut and ask them if such damage to a system4000 matters. They are well built so i can't see it having too detrimental an effect.
Hi Grahame,
I'm not that worried at present and I'm planning on up-grading to a Fletcher 3100 when the time is right.
Grahame Case wrote:is your workshop too small to store your lass separately elsewhere?i know the space behind your SYS4000 is too tempting, and believe me we store all manner of junk sheet materials behind ours, but its not neccesarily the safest place for your glass.
It's not actually behind it, as the glass lifts out of the rack without any obstruction straight onto the channel on the machine. The rack holds upto 35 sheets of glass at just the right height to lift a sheet down into postion. It makes life a lot easier! The rack is home made from timber.
When I get the time I will move the System 4000 into the back workshop and build an extra large glass rack as I want to be able to stock 100 sheets of glass to get bigger discounts. When this happens the glass will not be behind the machine, but at right angles on an adjoining wall, with two storage positions one above the other and the glass will then be stored in landscape orientation.
I was supposed to do this between Christmas and New year, but I ran out of time to do it.
Moglet wrote:
Forgive me, but just have to ask: how tall are you, Mark?
Hi Áine,
I'm about 6ft. I can guess what you are thinking, but the bottom stack of glass will be at floor level, so the top stack of glass starts about 3ft 4ins of the ground. I stock normal glass in 36" x 48" and Tru-vue in the larger sheets, which I buy and store in the box.
I'll be doing the same will my backing boards too, but on the other side of the room. It's only a small room, which will be quite good, because my small fitting bench, the System 4000, the glass and the backing board will all be within a two or three paces of each other and should enable faster working.
not really a framing related thing this, but it happened in the shop yesterday and boy do i regret it!
i was serving a customer with several sale items (all have these horrible address labels that have been printed on the ink jet printer with their WAS/NOW price) - now these labels don't come off easy - so we use Lion Adhesive solvent to loosen it, and a personna mountcutter blade to remove them, they just peel off- so, here i am talking away to this customer, having removed all the labels, and i move my right arm across my left, to cross my arms, still with a blade in my hand...
you can guess what happens.
i now have a red line along part of my arm where the blade made contact along the way.
