 |
| The Tire Miasma |
Today was an exciting day in Reptire Studios! For today, I
broke ground (or splintered wood, rather), on a grand studio infastructure
project that I have been dreaming about for quite some time now. And that is
shelving for my stockpile of many, many bicycle tires.
For about 5 years now, these tires have sat in increasingly
neat, organized, sorted piles, forming two rows along two edges/walls of the
studio space. In one of these rows, they sit on palets, yet, for all intents
and purposes, they are still on the ground, at foot level, and tripping level,
and worst of all, completely hogging all of the empty space above them.
My desire, is to pull them UP, into the vertical realm, so
that I may behold of them before me, and select from, or deposite to them,
tires of my choosing-True ‘tire files’.
And while the design for such a showcase has been long
developing, it has in the past year or so congealed into an image that I just
can’t seem to shake (and so I hope, and trust, that it will work..). And that
is of a sort of a tire grid. 3 sections high, 3 sections wide, 9 sections
total. Each section will be the appoximate width and height of a roadbike tire
(26 inches), thus making the entire structure a little bit of a sculptural ode
to the dimensions of a tire. I want the structure to read this way, for it to
be instantly recognizable as on the “tire scale”.
I also want it to be open and airy, and this is why I have
opted away from plywood, and chosen instead 1” x 1” lumber. Not that this will
be as cheap as I had hoped.
Each of these structures will employ at least 18 8-foot
studettes. And I need to build two! Even the 64 large screws were adding up.
For this reason, and even more so, for aesthetic ones, I
have decided to forge into new territory for myself as a wood-worker (and
perhaps the art of tire shelf making), and use dowels instead of screws.
Something about this idea strikes me as quite satisfying.
This week, I am building a test model of this shelf, just 1
unit wide, and three tall.
4 of the 7 timbers (the vertical members) can be reused on a
full set of shelves. Or, if it is successful, I might just keep it a single
standing shelf unit. However, my purpose in building this test shelf is to
ferret out any potential problems in a larger expanse of shelving (14 feet
wide, by 8 feet tall), so experimentation reigns, and we’ll see…
