The Kickstarter for The Walking Dead Mini Museum Handheld Collection goes live on May 5, and the full list of 32 micro-artifacts from the show included in each 4-by-5-inch “museum” won’t be publicly revealed until then. The initial announcement revealed three pieces that will be featured: One of Michonne’s katanas, a pair of Rick’s cowboy boots, and Negan’s barbed-wire-wrapped bat “Lucille.” This particular Mini Museum collection will be a limited-edition project, with only 5,000 made.
Reading the announcement, Polygon had a lot of questions: How does the Mini Museum team break a bat or katana down into 5,000 5 mm squares? What’s the process for neatly lining up 32 teeny fragments of props inside an acrylic square? Is it a waste to reduce a one-of-a-kind prop down to itty-bitty pieces?
We talked to Mini Museum co-founder Jamie Grove about the philosophy and the surprising practicalities of this project — and the techniques the company developed to break down other unique, precious objects into shareable fragments, from one of Amelia Earhart’s planes to a 13th-century Japanese sword.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: Why use Kickstarter for limited-edition collectors’ items? It seems like a surprising route for these projects.
Jamie Grove: There are a lot of costs that go into [these collections]. So when we actually prepare all these items — we call them specimens, or “objects” when we’re dealing with something like The Walking Dead — we’re going to prepare thousands of small pieces by hand. It’s all very much handcrafted. So that’s really the main reason for pre-selling with a crowdfunding event. There’s so much extra stuff involved. It’s not like “get a mold made and print some stuff at a factory.”
What are the logistics like? You want to do a 5,000-piece limited-edition run, and each piece features 32 specimens. How do you organize producing and museum-ifying 160,000 tiny objects?
More than that, because you’ve got to account for failures in casting and cutting, and other things like that. So when we think about a Mini Museum edition, we usually think we’re going to prepare about a quarter million specimens. And the logistics are crazy, because it’s not just one project. In this case, it’ll be 32 individual projects, because every specimen has its challenges.
So when you’re dealing with Lucille, you’re going to take this prop apart, you’ve got to be extremely careful. The techniques are totally different for this versus a knife versus a piece of costume. We use techniques we learned over the years, some of them extremely complicated. We’ll be using aerospace-grade cutting tools for some of these props, to reduce the kerf, because when you’re cutting something with a saw, the kerf is just waste.
In our world [holds up the Lucille prop] — a bat like that, it looks huge for us. People are like, “Oh wow, that’s not a lot of wood.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s so much material. We can do so much with it.” We use EDM cutting tools for metals, so the kerf is the width of a human hair. It’s super cool. We’ve used it on swords in the past.
Usually on a movie or TV set, they’d have at least half a dozen copies of a prop like Lucille or Michonne’s sword, made out of different materials for different scenes and purposes. Are you working with one of each prop, or are you breaking down several?
We only have one of single things like the sword. In other cases [like building materials], we might have multiples, because there are multiples of that thing. There are a few secrets coming up [in the Kickstarter reveal] where people will be like, “OK, you clearly have more than one of those, it’s natural.” But Lucille, we just had one. This all comes out of the AMC archives — they obviously had more than one Lucille. There have been Walking Dead prop auctions where somebody could acquire the entire piece. And of course, AMC’s kept archival copies of props as well. So that’s what we’re working with.
Some people will be like, “Oh no, you’re taking apart this unique thing?” It’s like, “No, that’s not really how we work.” There’s the right way to do what we do. We’re enthusiasts about science and history. We’re all super nerds here. So for us, respect is the biggest part of it. And what we’re doing is sharing these objects with other people in a way that they couldn’t get it otherwise. If you go look at the history of prop auctions around The Walking Dead, some wealthy collectors have some really interesting pieces in their private collections. This is one way to democratize prop ownership. That’s why AMC contacted us, quite frankly. They had extra items, and they were like, “Well, how do we get these into more people’s hands?” So they called us.
Walk me through the process. The three objects we can talk about so far are a pair of leather boots, a metal sword, and a wooden bat wrapped in barbed wire. How do you approach these things differently?
With Lucille, we’ve only taken small fragments off that for testing purposes, and for the prototype. We’ll try to make as few cuts in that material as possible with a blade. It’ll most likely go onto a bandsaw, and we’ll reduce it to a certain degree. But again, the saw has a kerf, so we don’t want to expose the material too much. At that point, we’ll switch over to rather expensive wood chisels that are extremely sharp, extremely detailed, and we’ll take it apart very, very carefully with those chisels. And then once we get it down to a smaller workable size, we go to razor blades, and then we’ll go even thinner, and hand-work through one at a time.
There’s a jeweler’s microscope behind me — I’ve spent like literally a month staring at the surface of Mars through this microscope, taking apart Martian meteorites. So that’s an example of how we would approach something like Lucille. We’ve done other wood specimens, like [the U.S. battleship] Old Ironsides and [Thomas Jefferson’s home] Monticello. That’s the basic way we’d prepare wood.
Leather’s really interesting. You have a lot of oils and things on leather, because they’ve been shined up and worn and whatnot. So you have to clean them first, because they can interact with the acrylic, and you don’t want that. Then you take the actual leather apart — you take the stitching out and pull the leather sheets out, and then you cut it down. Again, this comes down to razor blades. It’s all very hands-on stuff. There’s no robot, there’s no ChatGPT for doing specimen work. It’s all hands-on.
We did a soccer ball from Pelé, one of his personal workout balls. The leather [in Rick’s boots] is very similar to that, so we’ll probably be able to split that leather very carefully, too.
Michonne’s katana will be the interesting one. That’ll be one we’ll use EDM with. So we’ll send the sword off to an aerospace company that will actually put it underwater. If you look up EDM cutting, it’s really super cool. It’s basically a piano wire, something very thin that’s used to cut high-tolerance products. Have you ever seen something where one metal piece slides into another with a perfect fit? That’s done with EDM. So they run that wire underwater, they run a current through it, and it cuts right through things.
If I remember correctly, I believe that it’s not steel — it’s a prop sword, so it’s aluminum. So there’s some trickery that’ll have to go in there to get the cuts right. But those will give us complete blade slices. We’ve done this with an actual 16th-century Japanese katana. That was a whole ’nother story I’ll just tell you really briefly. We worked with an ethics committee in Japan who found specific swords for us to work with. This is in the third edition of the Mini Museum. These swords were amazing when they came, but [our contacts] were like, “You have to be super careful. If you drop this the wrong way, it could basically shatter and cut your hand off.” OK, so perfect for our use, but not something a collector should have, or really anyone should have.
Taking that apart with EDM was a little tricky, because the metal was a little shaky inside. This will be different, because it’ll be very solid and consistent. But we’ll have full blade slices, and then we’ll cut those into small katana shapes by hand here in our shop. We may put them through our rolling mill, which we do by hand as well. It doesn’t go off to some big machine in the sky, because we’re working on such a small scale. It’s hard to work with a machine shop, because they’re like, “How small is this piece you’re working with?” And we’re like, “We want to take this thing that’s a few millimeters, and cut off a few millimeters.” And they’re like, “We don’t do that! You have to use jewelry tools for that!”
So we have jewelry rollers here, and jewelry cutters and things like that. Anyway, we’ll cut those into little sword pieces, and try to make them look as much like little swords when we put them in the acrylic as possible. So that’s how all three of those will be prepared.
And you’re using the whole object? So not everyone who buys one of these is getting a mini-sword — some people will get a piece of leather from the katana’s wrapping, or a bit of barbed wire from Lucille?
Yeah, so they’ll get different parts of it. We haven’t really decided how we’ll handle that. The bat is a great example. It’s really dark wood on the outside, but inside, it’ll be a little brighter. Some people will get the color tone from the outside, and some people won’t. But we’re not going to stain the objects so they all look alike. With metal, we might scuff it a bit, hit it with emery cloth, just to give it a different sheen. We want each piece to evoke the idea of the original object as much as possible, where it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn’t work that way, and a rock is a rock. But where we can, we try to add that bit of artistry into it.
I can’t even get a poster into a frame without it coming out a little cocked. How do you line up 32 different 5 mm squares of various materials in a grid, with labels on each one, and then pour acrylic on it, without anything moving out of place?
We pay a lot of money for that, actually! We’re working with one of the best acrylic casting houses in the country. It’s a multi-generational company — they mostly do art casting. How you get it to stay is, you use a monomer. You have the grid, it’s been printed in there. The person who’s actually working on each individual Mini Museum will use tweezers and place each object on there. There’s a little drop of monomer that melts the acrylic a little bit, and also acts like a glue, and then they get laid out.
Once they’re laid out, sometimes they can float in position a little bit. We have a target range. That’s why you have to make more than 5,000 pieces, because sometimes they float far away. That’s why we do so much testing, too. If we have materials that are a little weird, like a piece of silicone — that’s really hard to actually stick to anything, and it can be quite dangerous to work with. Usually, those, we might coat with something else.
You also would have to be careful of bleed-out as well. That’s why we send things off for testing, if they’ve been painted or if they have other weird chemicals in them. We did a part of Amelia Earhart’s “Little Red Bus,” the Lockheed Vega. The paint is a nitrocellulose paint, the same kind of paint you use on electric guitars today. It’s super cool, looks beautiful, and it’s highly reactive.
So the monomer is like acetone, basically. You get anything — heat, a little bit of acetone — near that paint, and it just melts. It’s also very brittle. It’s a hundred years old or so. So I actually have to seal it in resin, then cut it, then seal it again, and then cut it again. Once I get to the final pieces, those are embedded inside another ring of acrylic, so it’s got edge-to-edge coverage, so it doesn’t bleed out and cause a puddle to happen.
And even with that, the little block [that makes up a Mini Museum] is going inside an autoclave, for pressure to blow the bubbles out. It gets hot, like 300 degrees hot. So nitrocellulose paint, it melts at like 200 degrees. That’s why you have to triple-seal it, so it doesn’t bleed out. That’s another thing we do — I actually just sent all the [Walking Dead] specimens up to our casting friends up in New York, so they could start testing some of the materials we have questions about. We don’t have questions about those metals, but fabrics and things like that, and especially costumes and props from a television series — you don’t know exactly what else is on there, right? And that could be a problem.
This is all incredible.
Fabrication is awesome, but also like a nightmare. You have to be completely crazy to do these projects. I’m happy to say that we’re absolutely nuts here, and that’s because we love it. You can’t do this and do it right unless you’re over the top. Like you said, it’s hard to get all these things lined up. I was hanging up a framed picture at my house, and my wife was like, “Are you able to get that straight?” [Laughs] I looked at it, I’m like, “Are you seriously asking me if I can get a picture straight? Well, it is larger than what I’m used to working with, but yeah, I’m pretty sure I can just get it straight!”
How big is the Mini Museum company? How many people work with you regularly?
There’s only like eight of us that are here all the time. And then we have a few other people that come in and out. A lot of it’s a labor of love here, because sharing science and history — so now I’m on my little Mini Museum soapbox. But it’s so difficult in this day and age to get people excited about science and history on any kind of large scale. So we’re not a big company, by design. If we were, we’d have to make ethical choices that just wouldn’t match what we are all about. You just couldn’t feed everybody otherwise. So we’re small by choice. But it’s definitely a fun environment with a pretty small team.
The Walking Dead Mini Museum Handheld Collection Kickstarter launches on May 5.
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