Finishing touches

Last night, Gary, Kathleen, Patrick and I put the finishing touches on the set.  It is very strange to not be doing lights as well.  I feel like I'm not doing part of my job.  On the other hand, it is nice to have the stress off.

Monday evening, Melanie and I made the "tonneau" cover for the bed.  Originally, it was going to be a full platform that the cast could be up on, but after blocking the show, Scott decided to not have anyone actually up there.  Marcy and Ryan sit on the tailgate, but not in the middle of the bed. So, we used luan and a 2x2 frame and made a panel that just drops in and covers the bed. This is a good thing because the inside of the bed was is ROUGH shape.  When we bought the truck, it had a plastic bed liner, which I pulled out and threw away, because it was going to be in the way of the platform.  Too bad.  If that were still around, I would have put a coat of black paint on it to make it look new and left it in.

Last night, I rolled a coat of flat black on the bed cover and then painted the floor of the band platform so that it is ready for musicians to move in tonight.

I have been unhappy with the bed of the truck ever since we first assembled it in the shop. Notice in the pic on the left how the space between the cab and bed is wider at the top than the bottom? It always looked like it was sagging.  So, I cut a 2" shim and last night, Patrick jacked the bed up and put the shim in.  You can see in the pic on the right that it looks a LOT better now.

Gary added a little rust to the lamp posts and billboard frame and painted out the bases to look like beat up concrete.  He then attacked the floor with the texture roller and several colors of gray and cream to make it look like weathered asphalt.  Finishing touches included cracks, a pool of spilled oil and a tire mark.

Patrick and Kathleen hung flags on strings above the stage
and out into the first couple of rows of the audience.  It brings the top down just a little bit on the parking lot.  I think that with stage lights and the parking lot lights on, it will feel like a real car lot.

The last thing we did was to move in one of the typical tan steel desks that everyone used in the 70's-90's offices.




So, that finishes my work on "Hands on a Hardbody".  It is now up to the cast, band, Ken and Kerrie to bring it to life.

Can't wait to see it all come together.
R

Loading in the BEAST!

Well, no one said that it would be easy...  

We pre-loaded one trailer on Friday with all of the small truck parts, the platform legs, the parking lot lights and part of the bill board.  I quickly realized that this was a two-trailer job.  The bed and cab pieces were nearly a foot wider than Larry's trailer and longer than his trailer.  So, we rented a 6x12 U-haul trailer and towed it with Gary's RAV4.

Melanie, Larry, Gary, Brian Scheppler and Patrick showed up at the shop and we got the bed and cab on the U-haul trailer. Turns out that once we put the bed and cab pieces in the U-haul, it was "full" too.  Oh, we could have crammed a lot more in. For other shows we would have.  Pieces made of wood and painted with latex are easy to touch up if they rub together and scuff.  The finish on the truck is a different story. Even with the second trailer, we couldn't fit the wooden frame on the first load. :/



We pulled out of the shop at 10AM. When we got to the theater at 10:30, Todd, Ray, Marshall and Allison were waiting for us.  We quickly unloaded the two trailers and hauled the small stuff upstairs.  Then Larry too Brian, and Allison back to the shop to load up the frame and bring it in a second load.  What a pain in the ass...

Meanwhile, the rest of us stayed at the theater, drug out platforms and supplies and put the band platform together. Still waiting for the second trip to return, we wrestled the cab in the building, thru the halls, up the stairs, and into the theater.  It wasn't terrible.  So, after a rest, the gang decided to try and tackle the bed as well.  Got it to the bottom of the steps, tried to get it on the elevator and it was ONE freaking inch to big to fit! Son of a Bitch!  So, we waited for the rest of the muscle to return

On their return, the bed was brought up the steps and into the theater.  The wooden frame, on the other hand, it was decided to bring up the fire escape an thru the stage door.  That was quite the adventure.  I am still not convinced that it was easier than bringing it in the front door, thru the halls, up the stairs, and in. But, whatever... I just wanted it IN.

While they fought with the bed and frame, I quickly put the billboard framework together and Patrick and I got it hung so that it was out of the way for the truck parts in the middle of the stage.

With the billboard up and the truck parts on stage, Marshall, Todd and Ray bid us adieu.  Allison began to tackle getting the scrim on to the billboard frame while Brian, Patrick and I began putting the truck back together.

The wheels went on first.  Because we took the casters off, the wheels would touch the floor and I wanted to make sure that they were on before we began to really add the weight to the frame.  Next we set the cab in place, followed by the bed.  It seemed as though it would go right back together the same as it had come apart.  Yea, so much for that.


The doors were the next thing that had to be tackled and they have always given us problems.  When we put it together in the shop, it too us two evenings to get them on right.  Now, you have to understand that, in order to be able to get the cab thru a single 3' door, I had to sacrifice somewhere.  To keep the cab intact, it would have been the equivilent of a 4'x4'x6' cube...not going thru the door and heavy as hell to move.  So, we had cut it at the floor behind the seat and at the top of the firewall.  This meant that we no longer had the front door post with the factory-tapped screw positions defined.  So, we had to make that up out of wood.  Wood flexs, shifts, splits and generally is just not as reliable as steel. And that wood door post was supporting the weight of the door when it is open. But, I digress...

We finally figured out that we had set the cab 1/4" to the right off from where it needed to be, which thru the door posts out of square and the doors wouldn't close!  Frustration mounted and I got pretty testy.  I apologize to Melanie, Patrick, Brian and Allison for venting my frustration. I have FOUGHT with this damn thing for weeks and again it is giving me problems...

Once the doors were fixed, the rest of it went together pretty smoothly. The holes all aligned and it fit right back together.







While all of this cursing is going on, Melanie and Allison were having frustrations of their own.  Scrim is a bitch to work with if you are painting something on it that needs to be recognizable.  You see, it stretches...A LOT!  Compounding that, I bought loose cut bulk scrim from Rose brand. Two edges were factory and two edges were cut.  If you have ever had fabric cut, you know it is never perfectly square and even.  Then, of course we didn't paint the graphic on square with an edge.  The only thing that I knew was that the graphic had a horizontal edge that formed the field of blue on the bottom. That line had to be parallel to the bottom of the billboard frame. After two false starts, the ladies figured out a system, got the thing roughly tacked in place and then began the painstaking process of pulling and stapling on small area at a time so that the letters didn't deform, bow or run uphill or downhill.

We wrapped up all of that an sat down in the seats for a short admiration of our work at 6:15PM. It had been a long day. We turned off the lights, locked up and headed back to IL for a drink and BBQ on me!  Long-ass day!!!


Today, Melanie and I will go back in a few minutes, finish skirting the billboard, hang the other parking lot light and then thoroughly clean the truck.  It needs to look like a new truck and right now it is GRIMY!

More later... In the mean time, I'm off to LA for the week. I need to get away from this project. It has been a grueling 5 weeks of work and I need a break. The cast can get in there this week and put their hands on it and get used to their new space.
R

See you at the theater.

Billboard update.

In my post a day or two ago, I ended with talking about designing and executing the billboard.  Today, we projected it on to the scrim and traced the design on with a Sharpie.  I then stretched it out on the floor of the art studio on top of some brown paper and Sharon and I went to work painstakingly filling in the color.

Periodically, we had to lift it as the paint dried to keep it from sticking to the paper below.

We made an executive decision to stop on the field of blue at the bottom once we got all of the letters and logos outlined so that it could dry overnight.

We suspended it off the floor by binder clipping the four corners to the back of stools and let it air dry.  This will minimize the openings in the scrim that are closed with paint and make it the most transparent.

Tomorrow morning, I will lay it back out on the paper and roll on the rest of the blue to the bottom and let it dry.  It looks like it will be done to hang this weekend after all...R

Last minute things before load-in

I have been scrambling the past week or so, trying to get things done before we load in on Saturday.  When it was all said and done, the truck took longer to finish than I had hoped. My goal had been to have it completely done and ready to move by May 1.  But that deadline slipped a little bit as I still worked on it last Saturday and Sunday.


SATURDAY
On this truck, the wheels need to appear to support the vehicle, but in actuality, they will hang on the frame and weight is carried by four legs.  We fixed plywood discs painted black at the end of each wooden "axel" to bolt the wheels on to. I spent 2.5 hours on Saturday morning trying to figure out how to deal with the lug nuts.

Because it is a Japanese truck, they are, of course, metric versions of 1/2" nuts.  But Imperial won't fit and our hardware stores are pretty limited in their metric selections.  Turns out that they are 12mm and there are 3 different threads for 12mm. 12mm x 1.5 threads/mm is the most common size.  Naturally, the lug nuts are 12x1.25 threads/mm. Those bolts are $4 each!  So, I explored buying new American lugs. But they come in packs of 20 for $30 and these wheels have 6 holes.  So, it is either $100 in metric bolts or $60 in new lug nuts.  I compromised...no lug nuts. I cut off the 1/2" cheap bolts that I bought and put on basic nuts.  Looking at the pic of the wheel below, I think that they will pass OK.

Saturday, while I finished the mountings for the wheels, Kathleen painted the aluminum rims.  I know that sounds like sacrilege but they were beat up and stained.  A coat of silver paint made them look good, at least from a distance.  I purchased four replacement chrome hub covers on eBay.

After getting the wheels worked out, finally put the truck behind me and went home.

SUNDAY
Patrick had his first tech rehearsal for a production of Spamalot that he is in and Melanie had a Special Olympics competition Sunday morning, so I started the day by myself.  Well, almost.  I brought the supervisor with me. She guarded the door while I began the next task...the whole rest of the SET!

My design calls for a pair of parking lot lamp posts and a large billboard upstage. More about the billboard later.

Most people don't pay much attention to parking lot lights except when they back into the concrete base.  They are actually fairly simple geometry and proved to be easy to make.  They are not much more than an aluminum "shoebox" that hangs off of the side of a square aluminum pole.

I made the light fixture out of 1x6's and a piece of 2x4 as the bracket.  The pole is a pair of 1x4's held together with two 4" wide strips of luan.  For the concrete base, I started with a 12" diameter sonotube concrete form and then capped it with some 2" styrofoam.  A little carving, sanding and a coat of paint and they have the right shape.  Gary will make them look like concrete after we install them.




I found a really cool paint at Home Depot that makes them look like the bronze aluminum. Melanie base coated them with chocolate brown and then Monday evening, top coated them with this bronze paint. It gives them a nice, dark metallic appearance.









Another project that had to be done was to make legs for the platforms that will hold the band.  They can be made on site, but if I pre-make them, setting up platforms goes infintely faster and smoother.

It took only a couple of hours on Tuesday evening to cut 2x4s and screw them together into a neat stack of legs, ready to haul.


Today, my attention turns to the billboard. I think that I have held this one until last because I hadn't made decisions on it yet. But I am at the point where I must. I knew that it was going to be painted on scrim so that the band could see thru it.  I knew that the band platform was 16' wide, so the billboard is 16' wide.  I bought 3 yds of white scrim.


I want to make a frame that hangs from the lighting structure overhead, but appears to stand on legs. So, tonight I will make the pieces that form the frame. I will also make some fake legs.  The thought is to staple black fabric to the bottom of the frame to hide the band platform and then apply the fake legs in front.  Then the scrim will staple to the back of the frame.

After designing the framework, I had to decide on the content.  Since Floyd King Nissan doesn't exist and doesn't have a real sign, I had to turn to the Internet for inspiration.  After a bit of playing, I came up with the following.

We will paint it on to the scrim in the art studio and then I will install it later, after the frame is in place.  If  that doesn't happen this weekend, I have a week before the band moves in and makes access to the back of the billboard a problem.

Friday afternoon, Patrick and Larry are coming to the shop and we will disassemble the truck and wrap it in moving blankets for the trip over.  I will feel SO much better when this thing is on stage and assembled!!!

More after the weekend.  If anyone has time, please come to the theater Saturday at noon to give us a hand.  The bed and cab of this truck are heavy and awkward to move.  It will take a few muscles to get it in place.

See you at the theater! R

PS...the components for the billboard are done and base painted.  They will get a coat of "bronze" tomorrow and they will be good to go...