The Meijer Project

Gillian Meijer, a renowned artist, and her husband Sjoerd got in touch with us after searching Europe wide for a specialist manufacturer to provide a picture racking system that fulfilled their very specific requirements. Fortunately for us, it transpired that the kind of art storage facility they wanted did not exist and better still, there were no companies locally to them who could manufacture anything like it!

 

THE BRIEF

The beautiful Dordogne Valley of Southern France was the last place we expected to be installing one of our picture racking systems and yet that is where we found ourselves after a most unusual request by a customer who discovered us on the internet.

Gillian Meijer, a renowned artist, and her husband Sjoerd got in touch with us after searching Europe wide for a specialist manufacturer to provide a picture racking system that fulfilled their very specific requirements. Fortunately for us, it transpired that the kind of art storage facility they wanted did not exist and better still, there were no companies locally to them who could manufacture anything like it!

Sjoerd Meijer is a retired furniture manufacturer who owned one of the largest furniture manufacturing businesses in Holland; here was a man who knew what he wanted: A picture racking system that had no top or bottom track whatsoever to intrude into the gallery space and yet could fully extend outwards like a normal system. This was the root of the problem; no existing system has been designed to operate in this way.

THE SOLUTION

There were of course only two options for us at this point; to refuse the brief or design a new kind of system from scratch. Of course, our intrepid nature as engineers led us to the latter. We knew some kind of sliding cantilever system could offer what was needed, but it was another matter entirely to design and fabricate the highly engineered and durable sliding arms to support the picture frames.

Above you can see how we developed the unit in the workshop; ensuring every part fitted and operated in the way it should. The cantilever arms offer an immense weight loading of 600KGs at full extension; that’s over half a ton!

The slide units have a complex array of greaseless bearings that give a smooth and even passage for the art rack and, if we say so ourselves, the whole picture rack looks pretty good too.

AmpFab Fabrication

AmpFab Fabrication