Flats Up

With the assistance of Ray Bowman and Jason Aughenbaugh, the core set of flats went up last night. Jason engineered support braces for the tops of the SL flats while I worked on assembling the "window" flat section. Ray helped by cutting braces and wrangling flats while Jason and I hinged or floor mounted them.

One inconvenience will be two sprinkler pipes. One hangs down off SR and is shorter than a typical 8' flat. I had Ray hang up two strips of black broadcloth to mask off R. The second pipe is more of a pain, as it is essentially center stage. It hangs just above 8', but the UC end of it has a sprinkler joint that drops down to about 7'11", which sucks. I had already cut the three "custom" flats that go on the platform to be 7' 6". The platform will be 5.5" (1x6 stock) + 3/4" (plywood top) + 3/4" (gap for caster clearance) for a height of 7.5", so that puts the tops of those flats at 8' 1.5". So I need to shave about 2.5" off of those flats to be sure. I think I only have about an inch on each end I can trim off, if that. Yikes.

Another bugaboo, but to less of an extent, is the annoying heater pipe off SL. It is a 6" sheet metal duct, and it prevents almost anything from sitting flush against the back of the SL "proscenium". If I need more masking, I might need to cut a custom flat for that.

Other than those, all is going well. We open in about two weeks, so I have some work to do this weekend. The colors from Delicate Balance will almost surely bleed through, so I will be slapping some Kilz on it first.

- Sean