Demolition concludes

At the moment I am only able to work on the project every other weekend, due to work and family commitments. So this weekend I continued the demolition work that I was doing previously, and finished taking the shell apart. A few pictures below to show my progress.

Figuring out places to put all the wood has been tricky. I now have a house full of wood. Good job I’m not having anyone round for dinner for a while!

With the shell demolished, I needed to move the base some distance back from where it lies now to allow me access to the rear (which will be the front of the shell, and where the screen will go for the projectors). After a little fiddling I decided to re-do the floor frame entirely. The original frame was made of several 2.4m x 70mm beams laid the perpendicular to the floor joists, to spread the weight evenly, and then covered with 18mm plywood sheet. However, since I did not have enough 70mm baton to underpin the sheets at the edges and in the middle, I ended up with one end unsupported in the middle, as you can see in the photo below.

 

This was OK when the weight of the shell was all going to be at the opposite end of the platform; but with the new shell oriented at 90 degrees to the old, a lot of weight will rest on the areas where there’s no support under the middle of the plywood, and that’s dangerous. Add to that the fact that I have no 70mm baton, or 35mm baton that could be doubled-up, and the obvious thing to do is to remove the 70mm baton and replace it with 18mm, of which I have abundant amounts.

While originally, the plan was to run cables and other mechanical parts below the shell floor, necessitating a large gap, now the purpose of the frame is only to keep the plywood off the floor below and to allow it to be flat and even where the underlying floor is bows slightly. So 18mm will be more than enough. I will, however, have to go buy a number of protective plastic stick-on pads to stop the frame damaging the floor underneath, so this is a job that will have to wait until my next available weekend.

Progress is slow, but nowhere near as slow as it was. I’m happy to finally be doing something constructive. Well, destructive, strictly speaking, but you know what I mean 🙂