kwartzlab makerspace

Jan
14

The crazy show before the show…

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You know the old observation that a duck that glides serenely across the water is actually paddling like hell below? Yeah, we did some of that this week. Now that Jack’s work is displayed beautifully in kwartzlab I can tell you that Gus, Ed, Ben, and I burnt the candles at every end prepping for the event.

Once the screens were built, they had to be hung. Level. Well.. visually level. With equidistant interframe spacing. Ed’s genius came in here when he suggested using turnbuckles to do fine-adjustment of the frame height. Coarse adjustment was just removing links.

More after the break…


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And once the frames were hung, the work was just beginning.

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I spoke with Ed on Sunday and said “Ed, this greenish flourescent lighting isn’t going to flatter the art. All I have are this box of halogen bulbs from Gus and whatever’s in the lab. Need a solution by Tuesday.” There’s nothing Ed loves more than an impossible challenge and he just never quits. He picked up 4 halogen sockets for $6/ea, took a bunch of dumpster-salvaged BX cable from my shed, a few coat hangers, and some custom brackets he fabbed on our brake press and made these most amazing “gooseneck” style lamps for the panels.

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Ben and I ran some BX up from a switch box, across the ceiling to the middle of he display, and then Ed broke that feed out into 4 separate reconfigurable cable lamps. They look amazing. Awesome job, Ed.

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And while Ed worked the electrical, and Gus started cleaning the lab, Ben…

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and I hung the speakers up in the corners of the room. Ben donated a whack of brand-new speaker cable to support this buildout. Thanks Ben! He also happened to have a special-purpose cable-stapler in his trunk that I didn’t even know existed. It handily centres the cable before pounding in a rounded staple. Worked like a charm.

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and with the speakers out of the way, we mounted the carmody-amp on the wall behind the bar. My BlackBerry 8520 is rockin’ the house.

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And then it got weird… ’cause it was really late, but we wanted the place clean and orderly so we put in another hour and a half on a cleaning blitz.

And that’s just another example of gittin’r'done at the lab.

Happy making,
DW

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