Ten uneven columns, a hundred years old, and no drilling into structural wood. OSB, drywall mud, and weeks of sanding on a scissor lift.
About the project
I needed ten floor-to-ceiling pillars of recessed pixel tape on the dance floor. The original columns were a hundred years old and made of uneven wood. I was not going to drill into structural supports, and you cannot buy a uniform enclosure that wraps a century-old beam.
I encased the columns in OSB to build a straight box. I mounted mud-in aluminum extrusions to the wood with a pneumatic nailer, then filled the gaps with more board. I plastered everything with drywall mud. That meant spending weeks on a scissor lift with an orbital sander hooked to a shop vac. I primed the columns and painted them flat black. Firing the 320 meters of tape made it look like light was jumping straight out of the concrete.
The wiring had to survive a nightclub dance floor. I sealed the bottoms with silicone caulk and ran the base wiring through thin metal tubing to protect it from kick damage. To fight voltage drop across the four-meter strips, power injection lines hid inside the corner moldings. The pillars took the crowd abuse exactly as built.
- AC/DC Load Calc
- Custom Fabrication
- Hand tools
- Lighting Design
- Madrix
- Pixel Mapping
- Power Distribution
- Power tools
- SPI
- TCP/IP
- Wire-to-Board Soldering
- Video Mapping
- Resolume Arena
Gallery
