Welding Tips and Tricks

These are some set carts I made for a road show about Marvin Gaye, the Motown singer who was gunned down by his father. When a show is on the road, there are literally thousands of pieces that have to be packed into semi trailers...lighting, sound, costumes, the set....and if everyhing is packed in loose pieces there is a good chance of it getting lost or damaged. Hence the set cart! All of the set pieces can be loaded on these carts and strapped down to it. Set carts also make loading and unloading the truck a lot easier because everything can roll off the truck and onto the dock. The last thing you want to start your day off with are a bunch of angry Teamsters or Stagehands because they have to hand carry everything into the building!

The carts can be made of just about any size square tube, it mostly depends on how much weight they will carry. These are made out of inch and a quarter with an 1/8th inch wall. The caster plates are 1/4 inch flat stock. Everything is welded together, even the casters are welded onto the plates. The carts are sized width wise so that 2 or more can sit side by side in the trailer. Every inch of trailer space is usually used and there are people whose job it is to figure out floorplans for a truck pack.

One of the most important considerations on a set cart is the wheel spacing. Not every theater will have a loading dock or a forklift, so the show will have to come off the trailer via a ramp that the trucks carry with them. The wheels on the cart have to fit inside the channel of the ramp so they don't bind, but they also have to be spaced wide enough so the cart doesn't tip over. On longer carts, like the ones I made, there is also a set of center wheels. The center wheels have to be placed further in towards center than the outer wheels. When a cart starts to go up the ramp, there is a point where the center wheels are not touching the ground. As soon as the cart reaches the point when the center wheels connect with the ramp, they will tend to swivel out and bind up on the walls of the ramp. By putting the wheels in closer to center, the moment they come in contact with the ramp walls, they'll be forced into a straight line without binding.

Below are a few pictures. The first one is the drawing I got for the carts. I wanted to show it because it's pretty typical of the drawings I get for a lot of our jobs. This one was messaged to my phone.

The second is a view of the bottom of the carts with the caster plates and casters welded on.

The third is the almost finished cart. There are still a few cross pieces to be added, but they are 99% done and ready to be loaded!

I enjoy what I do, but I'm sure if I'd found myself on your path, I'd be just as happy.

If you ever findd yourself working in my area,...

Interesting places your welding takes you on the show biz side of things. That's pretty cool, actually. Do you get to interact with any of the stars? From my experience, that is not a bad scene to be working in as they typically pay top dollar and extra for what seems as typical, unrealistic time constraints. You get to do a lot of different things and that has to keep things interesting.

I built two tee-tops for the movie, "Gone Fishing" with Joe Pesci and Danny Glover for two different sized (a 23 and a 25') Ranger center console boats. The 23 was for the stunts and the 25 for the actor coverage. One stunt 'person' was killed in the making of the movie. Also some radar arches for the Wellcraft Scarabs used in the original "Baywatch" series.

Years later, the 25 Ranger came back to us in the hands of someone who bought it at auction. On the boat was a bronze studio plaque stating it had been used in the movie etc. After explaining I had built the original tops, he gave me the plaque as a souvenir, and then someone liberated it from my work area, that could not have possibly had anything to do with the project.

We do some other minor projects and props for an entertainment company here in Tampa from time to time. Nothing on the scale of what you have posted.

Thanks Steve. I'll definately let you know when I'm around your area. We bid on a job that would have put me in Mobile AL right about now, but we didn't get it. My road dog days are mostly over, but I still bid on machinery and stuff so you never know where I'll wind up!

Jeff, that's pretty cool about Baywatch. I didn't watch the show all that much but when i did I wasn't usually paying too much attention to the watercraft ....Still, there is a lot of satisfaction turning on the tv, watching a concert or going into a museum, etc. and seeing something that you worked on and you can say "Hey! I made that!" Despite being in show biz for nearly 33 years, I've never had much interaction with the stars but i have met a couple of them throughout the years. Mostly I've been a shop guy and it's very rare for them to tour the shop, but it has happened.

Moneywise, I don't think I've ever made a whole lot doing this but it depends on the project...some are good, some are cheap. The best money i ever made was when I was a roadie doing industrial shows. The worst was building sets for television shows and commercials. Believe it or not some of the worst paying jobs are the last minute things that have to be done overnight after an emergency phone call. Usually by the time we are called in on something like that, the producer has already spent his bankroll and he/she is crying poor, but they "will always remember what we've done for them and there will be plenty of work from them to follow"........ And that's the last we'll ever hear from them!

The best money and the highest amount of job satisfaction has always come from those jobs that are planned out months in advance, where everyone from the producers down to the shop people have some sort of input and everything is planned for, or at least as close as that can be. Museum work, trade shows, exhibits have always been on the list of highly professional, highly enjoyable, good working conditions and good pay.

This is a picture from a commercial I worked on way back in 1984. It was for Chevrolet and it was supposed to kick off their new line of cars for the spring of '85. It was supposed to air during the SuperBowl that year, but I'm not sure if it ever did. I was the Lead Carpenter for this and it took me and my crew 5 days to build all the set pieces and about 48 straight hours to set it up on a soundstage the size of a football field. We built all of the city walls, the stage, the steps leading up to the stage and the Chevy bowtie sign that's hanging over the stage. The walls are 16 foot high and i believe they went out about 40 feet on either side. The stone work on the walls is 1/2 inch blue stryrofoam insulation sheets that were cut and beveled on a table saw and glued to the 1/4 luaun and 1x3 pine framed walls and were painted to look like stone. The steps leading up to the stage were 3/4 AC plywood and the riser facings were 1/4" white plexi strips that had lights wired in behind them. Whenever an actor would walk up the steps the lights in the steps would go on as he/she went up them. The stage is 24 foot wide and 8 feet deep and was built with 2x6's and 3/4 AC plywood. We put the framing every about every 12 inches because of the load factor of so many people up on the stage at any given time. There was a complete high school marching band on the stage at one point!The Chevy bowtie sign was also built from 1/4 luaun and pine framing and it had lights on the perimeter that were wired to chase. The lights on the front of the stage could also chase. We didn't do the buildings that are in the far background, those were painted on the cyc wall. The flooring is 4 x8 sheets of high gloss black plexi that were provided by another company.

I easily put in over 100 hours in 8 days to get this beast up and ready for three days of filming. Add to that the three days that I was the on set carpenter for ten to twelve hours a day of shooting and that sounds like a pretty good paycheck, doesn't it? Since I was on a weekly salary with the company that was the set builder, my total compensation for 2 weeks........$612.00

There's no business like show business!