Art-o-Mat

Her­bert Hoover — Artist — is single-handedly try­ing to revive the econ­omy (and make up for his famous namesake’s inabil­ity to do the same in a pre­vi­ous down­turn) by means of his con­tri­bu­tion to the Art-o-Mat project.

Lisa and I recently attended an open­ing event for Portland’s first Art-o-Mat now resid­ing in the Alberta dis­trict. Know­ing that Her­bert was present in spirit, if not in per­son, we biked over to check out the fancy new mem­ber of the Art-o-Mat community.

Our new Art-o-Mat is a bright red hot-rod of a machine with obvi­ous care put into every detail from the nice paint details to the very act of trans­port­ing it safely to it’s new home at the Radio Room.

There were a few other peo­ple there to check out the new art dis­penser and one fine patron at the bar even offered to pur­chase my token from the bar ten­der. So off I went — token in hand — to find the object in question.

Sure enough, right there in the first slot, was Herbert’s pewter pret­zel. After feed­ing the token into the mag­nif­i­cent machine, the lit­tle white stan­dard­ized box with Herbert’s cus­tom label­ing emerged (from the slot no doubt used in the past for some­thing with a pic­ture of a camel) into the deliv­ery tray below.

The pewter pretzel

Know­ing that Herbert’s pre­vi­ous saltine offer­ing find’s life in poses and places through­out the world through his Cracker Tracker web­site, I fig­ured that this pret­zel had some­thing spe­cial to offer. So sure enough, as I was off to my shop in “the hole” (home of the P.90 cam­era) I encoun­tered a com­mon imped­i­ment — a freight train head­ing east along Sullivan’s Gulch. Rather than sim­ply wait for the train to pass as is my usual habit, it occurred to me that the pret­zel sit­ting on the seat next to me might offer a solu­tion. So I put on the park­ing brake and got out to test my hunch. As you can clearly see from the video below, the pret­zel came through in splen­did form. Watch and lis­ten closely and you too will find that the pret­zel posses the amaz­ing abil­ity to increase the speed of the pass­ing train.

Reminded that Herbert’s artis­tic skills also include pin­hole pho­tog­ra­phy and pleased with the time-saving ben­e­fits of this pewter object, I put the pret­zel away and made my way up to the shop to work on the lat­est pro­duc­tion of P.90 cameras.

I just received the cur­rent edi­tion of the online pub­li­ca­tion Frac­tion Mag­a­zine which includes a won­der­ful gallery of work enti­tled Seek­ing Per­fec­tion: Tra­di­tional Apple Grow­ing in Japan by pho­tog­ra­pher Jane Alden Stevens. Frac­tion Mag­a­zine is one of a grow­ing num­ber of excep­tional online pho­tog­ra­phy pub­li­ca­tions fea­tur­ing work like Jane’s series on these extra­or­di­nary Japan­ese farm­ers engaged in yet another inspir­ing tra­di­tional craft. Jane’s pho­tos in this exhibit con­sist of a mix of pin­hole and lens-based work.

Rejected Apple, Fall, Aomori Prefecture

I orig­i­nally met Jane after she pur­chased a Pino­ramic 120 cam­era for a project she did on WW1 ceme­ter­ies in France called Tears of Stone: WW1 Remem­bered.

Jane shows a nat­ural tal­ent with the panoramic for­mat and was inspired by the large num­ber of WW1 memo­ri­als she saw on a trip to France to return and doc­u­ment them. The gallery of images that resulted from that trip can be seen at Jane’s web­site.

Memento, Ver­man­dovillers Ger­man Ceme­tery, France

Jane used an orig­i­nal model Pino­ramic 120 model for the Tears of Stone project.

Jane Alden Stevens with Pino­ramic 120

“The Ruin” — Cartago, Costa Rica — P.90 photograph

I imag­ine that one of the rea­sons peo­ple travel is the chance — how­ever small - it affords to see that you have ways about you that weren’t all that appar­ent trav­el­ing only amongst your own tribe. Lisa and I made a med­ical tourism pil­grim­age to Costa Rica recently and I was fre­quently aware that it was not my tribal elders that ran the place.

And there’s noth­ing like get­ting behind the wheel of a car to give you a quick appre­ci­a­tion for that. Never mind the odd lay­out of streets and utter lack of street name sig­nage in San Jose or the com­plete dis­re­gard for what sig­nage there was come night­fall, one of the things that most tick­led my cul­tural funny-bone was the pres­ence of bus stops in the right hand lane along the main high­way. Costa Rica is just sim­i­lar enough to my own home turf to find it amus­ing that I had to be con­stantly on the look­out for pedes­tri­ans on the high­way try­ing to catch a bus stopped in the out­side lane of traf­fic. But then — I don’t get out much …

So after quickly tir­ing from the thought of dri­ving by yet another stan­dard issue Costa Rican church (Italy spoils one for that sort of thing) I was com­pletely delighted to stum­ble across the Romanesque edi­fice know to locals in Cartago sim­ply as “The Ruin”. This was clearly another kind of project and indeed it turns out to have been designed in the 1870’s by the Ger­man archi­tect Fran­cisco Kurtz on a site typ­i­fied by the fre­quent destruc­tion of churches due to earth­quakes. In keep­ing with tra­di­tion, this exam­ple was never com­pleted because it was built on a site typ­i­fied by the fre­quent destruc­tion of churches by earth­quakes. More recently the church grounds have been made into a very pleas­ant con­tem­po­rary sculp­ture gar­den fea­tur­ing one my favorite mate­ri­als — rusty steel.

I con­sumed an entire roll of film with my P.90 while wan­der­ing among the Costa Rican cou­ples and fam­i­lies who inhabit the grounds appar­ently obliv­i­ous to their orig­i­nal intended role as a place of wor­ship and per­haps even the cur­rent focus on the dis­play of rusted per­sonal expres­sion. Nat­u­rally I couldn’t help reflect­ing on the Bun­galoft remodel and its atten­dant seis­mic con­cerns as I worked to be incon­spic­u­ous with my very con­spic­u­ous wooden cam­era while pho­tograph­ing the roof­less remains. My favorite image from that after­noon so far is the one above. I like the tree assert­ing its pres­ence next to the time­less old struc­ture and my own aware­ness that just below the frame is the ver­i­ta­ble throng of vis­i­tors keep­ing their vigil beneath the beau­ti­ful stone walls.

The Bun­galoft project  plods along,
The list grows.
The list occa­sion­ally shrinks.
We begin the pre­emp­tive sid­ing project on the front of the house.
The pur­pose …
To fig­ure out how the insu­lated rain­screen sid­ing will go together
and …
to give us some­thing more hope­ful to look at towards the end of the day.
So …

Rain­screen sid­ing underway

We have HardiePlank 5 1/4″ lap sid­ing stacked up in the house. Lisa applied the first coat of a deli­cious Ben­jamin Moore red paint to each plank. They’ll get fin­ish­ing coats after instal­la­tion in complete.

The extant walls in the front (the back half of the house will even­tu­ally be almost com­pletely new) are 2 by 4 fir studs with 3/4″ t&g fir cladding on the out­side. Among the other cre­ative things the orig­i­nal builder of our house did was to choose a pleas­ingly ran­dom stud spac­ing. The stan­dard prac­tice for Hardie involves look­ing for studs at stan­dard spac­ing to attach to. This was clearly not gonna hap­pen inten­tion­ally on the Bun­galoft. Dialogs with fiber cement sid­ing engi­neers and a cou­ple of obscure Hardie doc­u­ments on rain­screen sid­ing (Tech­ni­cal Bul­letin 09152008B) and SIPs con­struc­tion (Tech­ni­cal Bul­letin 07102008) led to the alter­na­tive con­cept of firmly re-attaching the exist­ing fir cladding and using it for the sid­ing substrate.

First lap sid­ing over the insu­la­tion and strapping

The rain­screen sys­tem will con­sist of a layer of 15 lb felt serv­ing as a sec­ondary water resis­tive bar­rier over the orig­i­nal fir cladding , a layer of 1 ” extruded poly­styrene insu­la­tion taped, sealed and flashed as the pri­mary water resis­tive bar­rier, 1/2 inch pres­sure treated ply­wood fur­ring strips and cor-a-vent strips to pro­vide a ven­ti­la­tion space and finally the Hardie siding.

View of the struc­ture of the cladding

The view above shows the Hardie plank applied to the front of the Bun­galoft and the prepara­tory work done on the adja­cent side. the first strip of sid­ing is applied with a thin starter strip over the cor-a-vent which is in turn applied at the inter­sec­tion of the 1 inch Fomu­lar insu­la­tion and the cus­tom flash­ing I designed to man­age water intru­sion and keep bugs away from the bot­tom edge of the foam. That detail can be seen below.

Rain­screen vent over foa­mu­lar insu­la­tion and cus­tom flashing

I’ve con­sulted volu­mi­nous sources of infor­ma­tion dur­ing the course of the Bun­galoft project and on the rain­screen issue in par­tic­u­lar I have found the exten­sive writ­ings of mod­ern build­ing sci­ence researcher Joe Lstibu­rek of BuildingScience.com very infor­ma­tive. A lot of sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion is now rou­tinely pre­sented and dis­cussed on the GreenBuildingAdvisor.com web­site. Some use­full infor­ma­tion can also be found at the Tool­Base Ser­vices Rain­screen arti­cle. But one thing is painfully clear — there is no one sin­gle one-size-fits-all solu­tion for rain­screen design. You have to eval­u­ate your par­tic­u­lar case against cli­mate issues, struc­tural issues, bud­get issues, local prac­tice and the build­ing codes to find some­thing that makes sense.

Den­til shelf ready to attach

We found this beau­ti­ful six light, three panel fir door on Craig’s list. It’s a blank with no holes or hinge mounts. Since part of the plan for the Bun­galoft is to main­tain a bun­ga­low char­ac­ter at the front of the house, I decided to add a typ­i­cal Crafts­man door detail — a den­til shelf.

A cou­ple of pieces of very nice, quarter-sawn fir taken out of the house dur­ing the demo phase were hang­ing out in the shop so I did a few vari­a­tions on shape and pro­por­tion of the three basic com­po­nents until I landed on one that seemed to work best. In the photo above, the den­til shelf lay­out is com­plete with an ini­tial fin­ish coat applied in prepa­ra­tion for glu­ing the assem­bly to the front of the mid­dle door rail. There is no fin­ish on the door at this point so the color is dif­fer­ent from the den­til shelf.

A cou­ple of other pieces of 8/4 quarter-sawn fir will be used to make the door frame with. I also had some weather seal prod­ucts left over from an ear­lier project. The adjustable door bot­tom seal from Resource Con­ser­va­tion Tech­nolo­gies has been mounted into the door at this point and will be fol­lowed with WS-14 sil­i­cone jamb seals mounted into the door jambs and head once I fab­ri­cate the door frame and threshold.

Although the door is not insu­lated, the six lights are dou­ble pane, bev­elled glass so, com­bined with the weather seals, this should be a rea­son­ably energy effi­cient entry door.

I wanted hard­ware that wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily tra­di­tional Crafts­man while still retain­ing some of the char­ac­ter of the style. So when I saw this Emtek Tus­cany cast bronze knob set at my favorite local hard­ware store — WC Winks, it seemed like a good fit. A nicely match­ing dead­bolt and hinge set com­pletes the package.