, so, now that the show is up and running, and I got another cable...here goes!!My build consisted of the masking flats, screen surround and welding the bent tube steel for the sculptural pieces. There were 6 sets of masking flats each 10 feet wide by 22 feet tall. Originally the opera wanted them built to that size, but we talked them into 5 wide by 22 high.. There were a couple of reasons for that, first was the weight. All of the masking walls got skinned with 1/4 luaun and then covered with 16 0z black commando cloth. Normally we would build something like this with an 1/8th inch wall rectangle tube steel but we went down to a lighter gauge just to save on weight. Even so, at 10 by 22, each wall would have weighed about 400 hundred pounds! Second was truck loading. A 10x 22 would fit into a drop deck semi trailer no problem...it's getting them out of there to load in the show that's the problem. Unless you have a straight shot from the loading door to the stage, it's not gonna go in that easy! So we made them loose pinned hinged sets of 5x 22 each.
The first thing I had to do was build my table. All of my welding tables are built out of wood. They can be configured into any size and shape that you need whenever you need it, it's easy to lay out and block in pieces for multiple units and it can break down easily after the build. All of my tables come from leftover from other jobs sheets of whatever we have, this table was made out of 3/4 melamine, 3/4 particle board, some AC plywood, a few pine 1 x 6's and 2x 4"s! Any table, especially one this big, with so many different pieces in it has to be square, and most importantly, perfectly flat. If you have any dips in your table, even tiny little dips, and you clamp down steel to that table, all you're going to do is weld in a warp and there isn't sh*t you can do about it once it's done. (Well actually there is. you can take another day to cut it all up and start over.) The table also had to be as square as I could get it otherwise the same thing happens..I weld it up out of square and the whole thing is out of square permanantly, it doesn't fit together right and looks like crap. So when you make your tables, make them flat and square. No floor that you leg up a table from is completely flat, there are always dips for drainage, etc.
My first pictures are of the table and how many shims it took to get it flat and level. Getting it square was another problem especially when you use particle board or melamine, those types of sheet goods are notoriously out of square to begin with. Not a whole lot out of square, mid you, maybe an 1/8th to a 1/16 corner to corner per sheet, but over all of that length it's just going to keep compounding until it's way off over 22 feet. I got mine within 1/32 over 22 feet, so not too bad!
I'll shut up for now, here are some table pictures.
