watching paint dry

So, today i get to do just that, watch paint dry. giving it about 90 minutes to dry, and 2 coats of paint on both sides, there goes 6 hours, just enough time left to haul it back up to the church and lay it out..
now a before and after pic.



c u tomorrow,

a day to weld

so, todays task, finish welding all the brackets, weld the truss, and try not to scare any of my new neighbors. I finally got settled enough to wrk in my garage, although it is still a long way from where I want it...

a couple random photos here, first, a shot of my band saw set up to cut angles on all the tubing... you can see most of one of the stick all jigged together.



a bucket full of scraps... yay...



on the last one here, the 2 others are hanging up on the shelf. I should put here a link to watch me weld the last one together, it is time lapse, so don't worry, you wont spend 30 minutes watching it. VIDEO


here it is all put together, running from my garage out past my car! yeah, total coolness;)


and now it's time to get ready for tomorrow, seeing it all come together is making me excited tho, I can't wait to install it.

a real machine shop

well, today I get to go to one of my friends machine shops. My mill isn't working very well, and they have EVERYTHING at his place...
the brackets are to hold some custom truss under the soffit for projectors. but of course as things always happen, I had to change my design last minute because the tubing I had to end up buying for the truss was a tad smaller then planned for. not much to say other then I learned what NOT to do on a mill...


everything in the back of my car, ready to go about 30 miles south to build stuff. and no, the electrical cable isn't for the brackets, its to wire up my new garage!



yes! now this is a mill!


ok, no, Those are mills!!!


finished holes, need to finish welding them and give them the infamous black paint.


alright, now to get ready to move on sunday!

So, today I get to tear out the floor in the soffit over the stage, it is 2 layers of .75" plywood. Im hoping that all the beams are where I think they are. I measured everything as best I could with the floor still down. I have to line up 4 clamps in a perfect straight line, but there is no way to hit it all with a laser or anything like that. well, I guess I could, but it would require I do a lot more demolition, and the plan it to put it back like nothing happened...

so here is a really crappy shot from inside. i will have to move the subs to pull out the floor, and since it will probably take me 2 weeks, I don't want to put them out of opperation, so I rigged them together real quick and picked them up about 18" so I could work underneath. I'll have to finish this project before I can hang truss now, cause I m using my chain motor...



and here is the floor removed. good and bad news tho, the beams are spaced exactly where I thought they would be, but there isnt any clearence to attach clamps, so I will spend my time till install it working out a new solution...



these are little "shelves" on the side, they are actually covering C beams that are for the goofy little wings on the side. but I have to take the top off and then cut through the wall and attach the clamp in there...



here is the other side already done, you can see what I'm talking about now, just really hard to tel what exactly is what in the picture...


well, I'm done for the day. I figured I'd put up some more of my Danger signs across the catwalk where I was working so nobody would step through and fall to the ground.



Well there was one piece of plywood that I couldn't get up but other then that it went well. I will have to come back with a crowbar or something and just rip it, cause i think some of the screws heads broke off...

exhausted and filthy- gonna go home and clean up.

cleaning off the stage

today's task, get rid of the old set. it came down really fast, and I was able to get a little ahead of schedule. the old projector mount was a pain to dissassemble, and the new one prolly won't be any easier to put up, but it'll be way more flexible.

pretty much everything is lowered in this shot. nice view of the battens (i built those out of spare parts and stuff, they are pretty slick)


lots of black squares... the 3rd (smallest) one is a sand bag that is keeping cables tight. that is on a third batten that is going to hold a new screen. there is also a pile of chairs on the front of the stage- there Las Colinas symphony was in here yesterday...


here is a nice shot that shows it pretty much empty, see the 3 projectors under the soffit? those are right at the edge of the stage, you actually have to put the genie on the first step to be out far enough to unhook it all...


2 of the 3 are down. and no, those long pieces of unistrut are not the only thing that was holding it up,


check out those screen frames, those were a custom job I did, I didn't want to spend the whole budget on fast fold screens or something, so I welded some tubing and laced on some fabric... they are going to be used again but a little different;)

and christmas has begun

YAY! Christmas! I love this time of the year, and best of all I get to build a new set to install in the church. so let's see, I've been finishing the whole schedule of when everything needs to be built or installed, it looks like it should work, we'll see.
today's project was to build some brackets that are going to hold a custom piece of truss. they were supposed to be easy, but me not watching carefully as i was cutting, i messed up some of the pieces, i'll explain later.

these actually are not the ones that got messed up, even though it looks crazy, just cutting 4 pieces at once


here is one of the pics of my "shop" i converted the dining room in my apt. it works pretty good though.


here is the other half. as you can tell it is crowded but it feels kinda like a cockpit, tight, but everything is just in reach.


well, I was hoping to cut some of the stuff ith this old plasma cutter, but it didn't wanna work.


so here is my "let me put half a dozen clamps on it so that i can try to fix my mess up" but i didn't like that solution. so I figured I'd call it a day and figure out the solution while watching some cartoons!!

let's see what's inside...

well, I guess i never mentioned what the speakers are, that might be useful, each side has an array of 10 dvdosc elements. they are wired in 3's with the top on it's own amp. but I think I want to change it so that it's 2,2,3,3. that way I can adjust the top 2 (the only ones throwing all the way t the back) and add a little more HF, it sounds a little dull in the top of the terrace when I was up there the other day.
anyways, I opened up each speaker, pulled out the horn cleaned them all and then ran tone and pink noise through them, i logged the graph of each one with their serial #'s so i can go back every year and see how they are performing... i found one of the mid range drivers was loose, and there was a lot of paint chips and hairs(or threads) inside, but other than that, they were in pretty good shape.

here i am making sure that the amp i am testing with is set to the right max voltage and polarity...


i put the measurement mic touching the ground to eliminate reflections.


lookin' at the screen, having no idea if what i was seeing was proper or not. it all ended up being slightly more of a comparison of all the speakers to each other, not really to what they were necessarily supposed to be. :(


the back panel comes off and then 4 hex screws take the back of the horn off, unfortunately, if you want to put it back together you have to torque it to a specific ft. lb. so i got to buy a $50 screwdriver just for that...


and finally i'm done, with one side, luckily i wrote down their order so it will go back together with no issues.

repairing line arrays

So I figured since I had some free time before I started full scale into christmas set up at the church, I would take some time to pull the main line arrays down, gut them clean them up, and make sure everything was in top working order before the holiday season rolled around. so yesterday after all of our sunday services, me and FOH engineer Frankie pulled the house left side down, i'll service this one this week and next sunday pull down the other side. hopefully i don't find much wrong:)

here is some of the rigging above the array before the motor was hung.


a view from up top, right here it is about 45' off the ground. the blue rope is for me, the white for guiding the line.


once it cleared the soffit i could repel down to it and unhook all the wires off the back.


and touchdown!


not the room looks like a kids mouth after they lost a tooth!