OPAL re-housing project starts …
The 20 NHM drawers
The funding hasn’t come through yet but I always planned to make a contribution myself so last Friday I bought the first 20 drawers from Max Barclay at the Natural History Museum in London! I didn’t have to buy them so quickly but I wanted to make a tangible start to the project and it coincided very nicely with my girlfriend wanting a trip up to London so … I am now the proud owner of 20 hardwood drawers – glass-topped and unlined.
Max (curator of beetles and one of the new faces of the Darwin Center) also kindly agreed to provide me with as many secondhand large unit-trays as I needed – they are slightly short but in all other respects fit the drawers perfectly. I also have an option to buy new unit-trays through the museum – they’re not cheap though so I am counting my pennies and trying to use secondhand as much as possible.
Unit trays are quite a problem because, although you might think that a ‘unit’ implies a standard size, there are multiple sizes. Oxford University Museum and Edinburgh have standardized on a wide ‘accession-type’ drawer; while the Natural History Museum & Cardiff Museum have standardized on a narrower, squarer design of drawer. There are other sizes too and the whole thing screams out for a revision but these massive museums have so many drawers already that it would cost a fortune to rehouse them, not to mention the years of work to transfer specimens into new drawers … sadly it will never happen.
A close-up of a drawer with unit-trays
I’ve had a go at making some unit trays but only prototypes with normal card. These were 100×50 and 100x100mm. I can imagin something like mounting card from art shops would be a better bet as it’s a decent thickness. It’s just finding some self-adhesive paper to completely fold around the back and into the inside of the box rather than just taping the corners which looks a bit tacky.
The main problem is being able to mass-produce them to a high-enough quantity & quality. It’s all a bit fiddly for me though – I’d rather be working on flies than making-up boxes so it probably works out better to just buy them. At 10-pounds per drawer it isn’t cheap but most of the boxes are small sizes and I’d need to make about 1000 unit trays in all to fill 40 drawers
In that case, your best bet is to make one huge walk-in box! ;-p