drying rack #2 !!!!!!!

It’s two years later and my drying rack design is so much improved. The second rack works much better, and is actually simpler in its construction, than the first one which you can see to its left!

(the same side of the studio, april 2008.)

Here’s the how the top & side connect:

Yes, I like cutting things precisely, even when working with medium-quality plywood and drywall screws… and yes, I finally bought a dado blade set, it does beautiful work…! (It may only be hilarious to me that the same week, I bought a food processor: two things I had felt the severe lack of for a long time, both potentially dangerous, high-precision, specific-purpose, well-made cutting tools… at opposite ends of the classic gender binary!)

The whole thing, without the shelves — it’s on wheels (or else it would be totally immobile: it’s bulky, about 3’x3’x4′, and when the shelves are in, it’s pretty heavy).

I don’t know why this took me sooo long to finish, it’s what I’ve been working on, or at least, putting as my first priority, for the past two weeks. Initial guesses: some difficulty with logistics like transporting wood and tools from my house to the shop (requires a car, which I don’t have); being restricted in how late I could work in the shop, since people with ‘normal’ schedules live and sleep above it (and I usually work late at night); needing to recruit a helper for cutting large pieces of plywood on the table saw (a problem I partially solved by finally, yesterday!, setting up a run-out table to catch wood coming through the saw); and really, a lot of ‘being scared’ of the project and getting overwhelmed by the thought processes necessary to figure out the numbers precisely and actually finish it. I don’t know why that is scary, because it is also the fun part! But there is a feeling that I got to know quite well during the process of making this rack, that would stop me, when it would get late or I would be tired or cold, that would just say in my ear: “Man, go to bed, this is too complicated to figure out when you are [tired/cold/sleepy], just work on it in the morning!” and my thought processes would stop dead.

Oh, also the fact that for a lot of the past two months, the temperatures in the woodshop have been BELOW FREEZING — that might have had something to do with the long time this project has taken me. (This is a recent realization: till a couple of days ago, I thought it was just really, really cold in there, then one of my fellow shop-mates pointed out that the sprinkler system must be a dry one, because otherwise its pipes would have burst…) Mostly I wear fingerless gloves down there; but because I’m not an idiot, I take them off to run stuff through the tablesaw… plus the square and ruler I use are both made of metal… ow ow ow. Looking forward seriously to SPRING.

Building this second drying-rack is a precursor to cleaning up my studio & sorting out the long-unsorted piles, which is a precursor to printing. Which I have to do, to finish up old stuff, before I can really draw any more new stuff. All in all, that means: I will be working on posters and prints soon. !!!

Books and magazines have been piling up in my bed-loft: the other day I counted 17 and took a picture.

(subject matter, generally: architecture, japanese art, dystopian futures, radical art & politics, gender identity and theory, photography, feminism, utopia… plus a couple of national geographics from 1988.)