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About
Frank De Luca, 62. Twenty-two years in the workshops under the big museum on Bloor.
How I got there
I grew up in Hamilton, the son of a tool-and-die man. I was good with my hands and bad at school, so I went to a two-year cabinetmaking program at George Brown and spent my twenties building store fixtures for a shop on Queen West. In 1999 a friend who worked in the museum's buildings department told me they needed someone who could build a display case that didn't rattle when a school group ran past it. I got the job. I stayed twenty-two years.
What the job actually was
An exhibit preparator does the physical work of putting objects on display. I built mounts — the steel and brass armatures that hold a fossil or a ceramic in the air without touching it in the wrong place. I built cases. I installed lighting rigs. I hung textiles on angled boards so the weave doesn't sag.
I spent four months of one year packing and unpacking a travelling exhibition that went to three cities and came back with two broken crates and one missing bolt. I still think about that bolt.
I was in the dinosaur gallery for most of the 2010s. The barosaurus re-mount in 2013 was mine — I designed the tail support that's still in there. If you look at the base of the tail where it meets the armature, there's a brass collar. That was my solution to a problem that had been annoying the department for nine years. Pavel in the buildings shop machined it from a sketch I drew on the back of a work order.
Why I left
Sixty is when your shoulders start telling you the truth. I had a rotator cuff repair in 2022 and came back too early, and after that the overhead work was finished for me. I retired in the spring of 2023. I still get called for the odd consult — I did two days on a mount last winter — but I'm not carrying steel anymore.
Why this site exists
Because I kept answering the same questions. My sister's kids, my neighbour, the man at the hardware store: which entrance, how long, is it worth it with a four-year-old, where do I park. I wrote it down one weekend in March 2024. My daughter put it online. Then I kept adding to it, because retired men need something to do that isn't golf.
I keep it independent on purpose. No ads, no commission, no ticket sales. I link to the museum's own homepage because that's the only place you should be buying admission. If that ever changes, I'll say so here in plain words.
One more thing, since people ask: I don't have a Facebook page, I'm not on Instagram, and I don't do tours. This site is the whole operation. If somebody claims to be me somewhere else and asks for money, it isn't me.