Welding Tips and Tricks

In January our shop got the bid to build the set for a brand new opera, Frida, based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The set consisted of many elements...stairs, upper levels, masking flats, projection screen surround and many sculptural pieces. About half of it was built out of wood and coated styrofoam, the other half out of welded steel, so yours truly did all of the steel work. I wanted to start this thread during the build and go through it step by step, but I lost the cable that connects my camera to the computer , so, now that the show is up and running, and I got another cable...here goes!!
My build consisted of the masking flats, screen surround and welding the bent tube steel for the sculptural pieces. There were 6 sets of masking flats each 10 feet wide by 22 feet tall. Originally the opera wanted them built to that size, but we talked them into 5 wide by 22 high.. There were a couple of reasons for that, first was the weight. All of the masking walls got skinned with 1/4 luaun and then covered with 16 0z black commando cloth. Normally we would build something like this with an 1/8th inch wall rectangle tube steel but we went down to a lighter gauge just to save on weight. Even so, at 10 by 22, each wall would have weighed about 400 hundred pounds! Second was truck loading. A 10x 22 would fit into a drop deck semi trailer no problem...it's getting them out of there to load in the show that's the problem. Unless you have a straight shot from the loading door to the stage, it's not gonna go in that easy! So we made them loose pinned hinged sets of 5x 22 each.
The first thing I had to do was build my table. All of my welding tables are built out of wood. They can be configured into any size and shape that you need whenever you need it, it's easy to lay out and block in pieces for multiple units and it can break down easily after the build. All of my tables come from leftover from other jobs sheets of whatever we have, this table was made out of 3/4 melamine, 3/4 particle board, some AC plywood, a few pine 1 x 6's and 2x 4"s! Any table, especially one this big, with so many different pieces in it has to be square, and most importantly, perfectly flat. If you have any dips in your table, even tiny little dips, and you clamp down steel to that table, all you're going to do is weld in a warp and there isn't sh*t you can do about it once it's done. (Well actually there is. you can take another day to cut it all up and start over.) The table also had to be as square as I could get it otherwise the same thing happens..I weld it up out of square and the whole thing is out of square permanantly, it doesn't fit together right and looks like crap. So when you make your tables, make them flat and square. No floor that you leg up a table from is completely flat, there are always dips for drainage, etc.
My first pictures are of the table and how many shims it took to get it flat and level. Getting it square was another problem especially when you use particle board or melamine, those types of sheet goods are notoriously out of square to begin with. Not a whole lot out of square, mid you, maybe an 1/8th to a 1/16 corner to corner per sheet, but over all of that length it's just going to keep compounding until it's way off over 22 feet. I got mine within 1/32 over 22 feet, so not too bad!
I'll shut up for now, here are some table pictures.

Here's some pictures of the 5 x 22 flat sections on the table. These were made out of 16 gauge 1x 2 rectangle tube. I think it was that gauge, it might have been lighter. The 3 short upright pieces welded onto the back were for support jacks to mount to. Since I mostly worked by myself, I had to use a chain motor to pick the finished pieces off of the table. At this point, they weighed about 150 pounds, certainly light enough to handle by myself but at 22 feet long they were kind of awkward! I cut all of the lengths with a Kalamazoo 9AW horizontal bandsaw. It has a 12 inch cut opening so I could gang cut 5 or 6 at a time. That saved me a lot of time and aggravation. Another reason I like the bandsaw over a cold saw or an abrasive chop saw...it might take a little more time to cut but it's a heck of a lot quieter and the cuts are a whole lot cleaner. No grinding afterwards which is fine with me! And if there's too much noise, how am I supposed to listen to my Black Sabbath and Slayer CDs?

oooops, sorry, I didn't mean to put in the pipe threader picture. That was supposed to be for later!

Support jacks for the walls, these are made out of the same tube steel. They loose pin hinged onto each wall. We couldn't find a hinge big enough without having to alter the h*ll out of it, so we made our own. The barrels are cut 1/2 o.d. inch black pipe and the pins are 1/2inch hot rolled steel rod that was bent in a brake.

interesting
thanks for posting
craig

Thanks! There's more...

I had to weld all of the hinge barrels onto the flats and match them up to the support jacks so they would line up right and let the hinge pin drop in and remove easily. There were several hundred barrel pieces to weld on and it would drive me crazy to hold each one on, tack them in place and hope that it was right the first time. So in place of that I made up a holding jig that held the barrels in place, spaced them right and centered them in the right spot. It worked great1 That first picture should be that jig.

Once the flats were welded up, they had to be faced with 1/4 inch luaun and 3/8ths plywood strips on the back to act as a nailing strip for the black fabric. Fortunately, we have a coil nailer that can put a nail through wood and up to 1/8th inch steel. Those should be the second and third pictures. Whatever parts of the steel that may have bowed in or got out of square slightly, I quickly got back into shape with the luaun facing. Some of the flats were odd shapes, particularly for the screen frame, so when those were skinned, rather than try to cut them to shape first, I attatched the luaun and then flush trimmed the pieces to size.

Sweet project!

I've said it before, if I weren't doing what I'm doing, I'd love to do what you're doing.

I'd also love to spend a day in your shop. I'd enjoy seeing your process, and I'd love to show you the things I've learned that can bring "out of square" or "plumb", or "level", or even "flat" back to where you want it. Polishing other people's turds is something I do almost every day.

Steve S

Because the flats were so wide and hinged in the middle, there was always a chance that they would try to close up due to any number of factors, the most likely one being because they can. And you want the flats to be nice and flat and even...so I had to make up sets of stiffeners that would cross the seams top and bottom to hold the straight in line with each other. These were made out of the same tube steel with a few offsetting hinges to lock it in place. They ranged in length from 2 feet to 24 feet long. Each set of 10 x 22 flats got 2 sets of stiffeners and the back wall, which was also the screen surround, got around 16 to 18 of them. The back wall, when all put together was 40 feet long by 22 feet high and also had the screen rigging plus supported a large upstage platform. So it had to be nice and sturdy! The first picture is the stiffener pieces, the other pictures are a pile of flats all covered and ready to load on the truck.

These are some of the other things that involved steel, they are tree branches, leaves and some blood veins. The veins and branches were made out of a frame of 1/2 inch steel hydraulic tubing that was bent and rolled to shape and then welded together. it then had Styrofoam mounted onto the frame pieces. they were carved, sanded and then sprayed with an acrylic resin and cloth ( kinda like fiberglass) and then painted. the leaves were framed with 1/8th inch wire rod, welded to shape and then covered with canvas and painted. I didn't have anything to do with the Styrofoam part, than goodness! I hate working with that stuff, but I have to admit it can do some really nice stuff in the right hands! And just as long as they're not my hands, I'm happy!

Here's some more pictures of other, non steel, scenery..the first couple are some of the painters elevations. These are what the painters use when they mix up their colors and this tells them what the designer wants to see.

Steve,

C'mon up anytime you want! You have an open invitation to stop by whenever you want.

Other Steve

Here's a picture of the finished project under show conditions. Can't see what I made? Good! That means I did my job right

other Steve,
When I first glanced at the title of your post I thought you were building a set for Opra Winfrie, and my first thought was he's going to need a bigger welder. Lots of heavy duty stuff is needed for that set.


Nice work, as usual.

Len

Thanks Len!!

I told the other guys about Oprah, they got a good laugh out of it!

Other Steve

Other Steve,
I have to agree with everyone else, you have a interesting job. Great job, we can tell you take great pride in your work!!
-Jonathan

Nice work, I always wanted to get into that line of work. Envious of your cool project here.

Excellent job. No doubt there were many challenges along the way. The finished work is a piece of art!