Transporting the Museum - Don Cockrell

Watch this video to find out how Don Cockrell makes transport mechanisms, called stillages, which are being used to transport and store specimens and objects from several of our Galleries. Galleries at the Western Australian Museum - Perth are being decanted to the Collections and Research Centre in Welshpool in preparation for the New Museum. 

See a timelapse of the Mammal Gallery decant here - watch Don's stillages in action! 

Transcript

I’m just making stillage crates and crates for all the stuff from the Museum that’s going to be moved to Kew Street.

A lot of cutting and screwing together of timber and plywood.

I’ve made ten stillages which are different to these. This one is going to be a crate. This is for a tent. The stillages are mainly for animals – the big bison, elephant, stuff like that.

To make all these? A couple of months. Two or three months. I had to measure them all up first. Decide how we’re going to build them. And start, start building.

Well no, I’m just about finished, I’ve got two more to make. One more crate here and another crate as well.

Main tools? Circular saws, docking saw and electric planer machine. And a band saw too.

This particular one here is actually a flat pack. This just pops off and pops out. Falls to bits into a flat pack.

Once it’s in that stillage it stays in it until it’s wanted. They’re that well made that they will stand up to six or seven years without any damage.

This is the trolley for the raft from Katta Djinoong. And the raft is actually 4.5 metres long. You can see the length of the crate I had to make to suit it.  What you do is you take the lid off, put the raft in and then turn it back up onto these transport wheels. And it’s easier to move, you just push it [laughs].

These ones are called stillage crates. And they’re to take all the big mammals. Like the bison, the elephant, the horse etcetera. And these are all flat packs as well. All of these panels pull out and lay flat.  And of course all this pops out. It’s all transportable.  These trolleys, they’ll use the bases to take all the small mammals and then they’ll put these sides back on to take the big mammals. So they’ll be used twice.