The eighty-foot screen pulled four hundred amps and cooked its stock power supplies in the club heat.
About the project
Nobody sells a mount to hang an eighty-foot video screen perfectly flat inside a hundred-year-old building. I had to build a custom suspension frame from strut channel, L-brackets, and allthread.
The owner wanted the fifteen-foot-wide ceiling to run the length of the dance floor and then curve down behind the DJ booth. I drove lag bolts into the beams and hung the strut. To get the grid level, I put a laser in the ceiling and used the washers on top of the strut as targets across the room. Each row of the curve needed its own set of allthread drops to hit the right angles. The corner plates for the video panels bolted directly over the strut, locking everything in place. We expanded the system during the pandemic lockdown, adding curved wings, marquee strips, and a freestanding monolith on the floor.
I gave the ceiling a 400-amp service on switched relay banks so it could run full white at full intensity. But the panels sat in the highest, hottest part of the room. The mix of club heat, vibration, and crowd moisture cooked the capacitors in the stock power supplies. We swapped the dead units for better replacements every night before doors until the rig finally stabilized.
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