As many of you know we have been removing our band risers from the stage for our message setting for several years now. This has caused us to have to engineer some fairly ingenious systems for moving set pieces around on our stage in order to remove the risers. We came up with a plan to create an entrance door to move the risers through on a more permanent basis so we don’t have to reinvent the process of removal for every set. Because of circumstances we were able to demo the walls under the stage at the beginning of the summer.

Although establishing the entrance doors was the end goal, we have been using this area for backlighting some set pieces all summer. We used this time to design the doors and get the initial construction of the doors done. We installed the doors as we changed out our fall 2010 set.

These two doors swing using a pipe hinge. Both doors are just over 13′ wide and swing to a 70degree angle creating a lot of space for the risers to roll through. This space has helped to speed up our transitions and make removing the guitar pedals via the guitar sleds a real easy addition to our transitions. We are able to clear our stage of all band gear in less than one minute. These doors have allowed us to further accomplish our desire to have a clear stage for our communicators and the video products that we create.

Design:

For those who are interested, the door was designed to be modular. This is so we can easily remove the sections allowing us the flexibility to use this space to project on set pieces or light set pieces from behind. The whole structure rolls on six wheels. It pivots from two ball bearing pipe hinges mounted on the floor and on the support beam below the screen. The wheels are staggered at a slight angle allowing the door to rotate easily on its arced path.

The wheels are mounted to a footer beam that was constructed by wood, gluing three 2×4x14’s, that had been cut down to 13′4″, together. This creates the base for the entire door. The hinge section of the door consists of a pipe cut to size running vertically between the two ball bearing hinges. The pipe is bolted to four 10″ horizontal 2×4’s via carrier bolts. The hinge section continues across so that the entire section is 41″ wide. This was intentionally done so that all four sections of the door are 41″ wide. This keeps the seams in the door evenly spaced. The other three sections of the door are 2×4 structures constructed individually with framing nails. The four sections are bolted together so that they are easily taken apart. The front of each section is surfaced with a 3/4″ piece of MDF cut to size and screwed to the 2×4 structure. 3/4″ MDF was used because the MDF is smooth enough to match the drywall once painted and thick enough to staple or drill set materials on to it. The whole structure is sured up using a strand of aircraft cable with a turnbuckle running diagonally across the back of the structure. This allows us to pull the top right corner tight into alignment with the bottom left corner. Each section of the wall was then strapped to this cable using corrugated metal straps. The whole structure if unbolted can be removed in five relatively light sections.