Curators and enthusiasts gathered at Summerlee Museum on 18 May to hear from the Monument Fellows based at National Museums Scotland and North Lanarkshire Council Museums & Heritage.
James Wood gave a talk about the history of the use of machine tools in Scottish engineering. Drawing particularly heavily on marine engineering, Jim showed some superb photographs and gave us an insight into some rare machine tools that he had a hand in saving - and also a few that got away!
Our Chair, Miriam McDonald, then took the opportunity to tell the group about STICKand has hopefully won the network some new recruits.
After lunch it was the turn of Dan Mackay, who previewed some clips of film he is making with NLCMH, demonstrating different types of machine tool used for forming flat surfaces. Dan then showed some photographs of examples of these machine tools 'in the wild' and from catalogues, interspersed with personal anecdotes. Having explained the limitations of tools such as planing machines compared with modern precision methods, Dan then gave a demonstration of how a job would be finished using hand tools.
To finish the day, Dr Klaus Staubermann, Principal Curator of Technology at NMS, led a discussion on future projects and events that the network could organise which led to some very interesting ideas.
Many thanks to all who attended and to the Museums Association for supporting the event.
We are hoping to run another Monument Fellowship knowledge transfer event before the autumn and want to hear suggestions as to what that might be: one option is to have a demonstration of mould-making and casting. Watch this space!
No comments:
Post a Comment