“You are the technical direction team in charge of the scenery crew at City Tech. The flats shown on the attached drawing (Plates GP, E1, E2, and E3), are to be built for show to take place in the spring of 2018. The show will perform starting on Thursday, March 22nd and is the first show of the spring semester. The scenery will be built, installed and painted by normal Tech Production crew people. The show is a big comedy, and the door will be slammed all the time. The walls should not shake when the door slams.”
In this project, I was able to work on making sure my construction drawings were more detailed, as I found more efficient ways to demonstrate my smaller details in my drawings from Problem 2’s outcome.
Prototypes:
We were able to create prototypes within groups in order to determine what the best flat-bracing method would be to keep the scenery from shaking too much when the door was going to be slammed during the show run. We determined that making steel jacks would be a good prototype, since it was the sturdiest material we had available in the shop.
It took us a little over a week of three tech days to create the steel openframe jacks, so that people could pass through. The steel would create a low-profile reinforcement for the back of the flats. We found that it was equally successful in the experiments as the wooden jacks because the movement and weight distribution was the same. If we really wanted to imitate the structure, it would be best to have the scenery in full assembly, as its overall behaviour would be dependent on the weight of the entire set once it was assembled. We only tested out one steel jack, so the wiggling of the scenery would end up moving towards the open side of the flats that were put together. We also had a flat on top of both of the other flats to imitate the actual height. Because the complete prototype structure was so top-heavy and narrower along the sides, it made it wiggle much more than it typically would had the set been completely assembled. The importance of prototypes was evident in this learning experience.
