A behind the scenes look at film and television Prop making peppered with everything else creative we do!
When I lent my services to a collegue who was working on a film about 12 years ago, I was introduced to the world of cnc. I remember watching this huge machining centre milling out a slab of mdf and turning it into a fantastic set of gears. I knew that it would have taken me hours to achieve the same thing with traditional power tools. I decided then that I would invest in a cnc router for my own business Oxenham Design. At that time I could turn on a computer, but even to check email seemed like a crazy set of operations. I persevered and learned every piece of relevant software I could get my hands on. I am now fortunate enough to be using Vectric's ASPIREsoftware, and Techno cnc routers, which has helped us to create some amazing projects, both in part, or in full. I thought that this blog would be a great place to share "behind the scenes" adventures with the software, materials and equipment we use, as well as the projects we build.
Jody and I's teaching gig in Indiana went really well! We got to meet an amazing group of people, and see a few people from past years. Our awesome hosts, Rob and Deb Jones, did a super job of organizing the weekend, and taking care of all the food!
This was our 3rd year here, and hopefully there will be many more!
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Once back home though, we were hard at it! Tuesday was an entire day of painting on the miniature slide job. Non-stop. From 8:30 am, until 12:30 am to be exact.
Our Techno quickly became a paint drying table for the many twists and turns of the slide. Even though I showered when I got home, my arm is still a weird yellowish color, almost like my liver was failing, but only on my right arm!
Production showed up this morning, and picked up all the painted pieces.
When John and I arrived on set, it was around 11:00, and all of our slide parts were laid out safely on moving blankets in the corner of the studio. Thanks guys!
The set up took a lot longer than I thought. This was due to the fact that trying to centre the whole thing on the platform was a little hit and miss. 1 little movement at the start, ended up in a really large movement at the bottom end!
However, it did eventually come together in the end!
Jody and I have to go back to the studio tomorrow, just in case anything happens to it, we'll be there with capes on our back, ready to save the day ;)
8)
JWO
We have been pretty much 24/7 since Friday! The hockey museum job, and the waterslide have taken completely over the shop, and our lives!
This is largely due to the fact that we're teaching in Indiana on the weekend, and we needed to be at a certain point before we can leave.
The tubes came together without too much fuss, and by Friday night, John had them all glued together. We have to keep the sections in a reasonable state of assembly. Meaning that we can't put too much together for painting reasons, but we need enough together to make on set assembly easy.
The trimming and clean-up, and edge sanding took a REALLY long time! One of the unsung heroes on this has been little Jody! She has sanded, and cleaned up every single tube, bracket, pipe, holder and cabinet involved in these jobs. We certainly wouldn't be where we are without her behind the scenes efforts!
There were sections everywhere......And the size masses up pretty quickly!
The brackets that hold the copper support arms were all cut. Actually, they were cut twice. The first run was from pvc, but was too flexible under the weight of the tube sections on it. So I beefed up the size, and cut them from 1/4" high impact styrene. The second set were waaaay better for the task.
All of the support arms to hold the tube slide were made from 1/2" copper pipe. Readily available, and easy to cut on the table saw. plus, getting it in 12 foot lengths was pretty handy!
I needed 2 holes, perfectly aligned, to mate to the brackets to the main support tubes. These will eventually hold up the whole slide.
After humming and hawing about the best/ fastest way, I milled out some 3/4" plywood for a jig that would hold 5 pipes at a time. This clearly was the best/ fastest way to handle the job.
We made the main support poles from 2" abs pipe, The larger bases were cut from 4" pvc pipe, and filled with sand for weight. I can already tell we'll be adding at least a 9" mdf disk to the bottom to increase the footprint of the poles.
This is one of the final sections with all the supports and saddles installed. It's going to be a bit of a paint to paint, but it certainly looks industrial!
The first tube spiral was a huge pain to get assembled. Clearly there were compounded errors between the perfect computer world, and the final pieces Most of this, I would think, has to do with the vac-forming and gluing of the sections. And the amount of sections just adds to the problem. Basically, the full overlapping spirals pulled in around a 1/4" overall. So there was a huge amount of time spent comparing the cad file to the actual part, then figuring out where the corrections had to be made. Once John and I solved it, it was full steam ahead!
Kinda ugly in the photo's, but it's way too cool in person! The clear is funny, it photographs terrible, but looks great when your standing in front of it.
And just for something to do, we rolled a styrofoam ball down the top half! John suggested a donut, but that might make it hard to paint after!
On a side note...........
We finished the rest of the cabinet work, and that got picked up last night at around 6 pm. We just have 2 touchscreen tables to finish for that job, but we'll tackle that when we return.
8)
JWO
John got all the tubes vacuum formed, and although he didn't say much, I think he was glad it was over! In fact, he started putting laser cut offcuts into the molds as well, so there was a weird assortment of small letters and shapes in the plastic sheets as well. A clear sign of boredom I believe :)
The trimming is a two part process on these. The first trim is to run the part around a small laminate trimmer with a bearing, this gets rid of the bulk of the plastic sheet.
The second trim uses a dremmel with an 1/8" guide point bit that follows the flange, cutting off any additional remaining plastic. I'm sure John was super excited to trade in vacuum forming for this crappy job!
I glued up a couple of sections of the tubing to see what it was going to look like. The pop bottle is in for scale. These are pretty large sections!
The other project in the shop at the same time is some cabinets for a travelling "Hockey Canada" museum.
2 of the maple cabinets get the logo carved into the face, so our Techno did that while I assembled the remaining portions of that cabinet.
It looks great front and center!
Heres one of the final cabinets. There are actually 2 of these that bolt together around a 6 in steel pipe. The pipe becomes the "hinge" that lets the cabinet rotate as a pair 90 degrees. This will allow the custom trailer's sides to roll inwards without hitting the cabinets. One of these cabinets gets to hold the Stanley Cup!
The good news is my stack of maple is quickly getting smaller!
8)
JWO
With the overall shape of the slide approved, I took my low resolution tubes I created in Hexagon, and converted them to hi-poly models. Our Techno would machine all the facets of the low res version if I didn't do this. I also extended the flanges on all sides, and brought everything down to an even base plane.
The model imported into Aspire perfectly! I added a 5 degree draft in Aspire to make releasing the vac-formed shell a whole lot easier.
The only drag at this point, is that Aspire adds a draft to the entire part (shown in yellow)
I can't have any draft on the inside flange, as this will change the angle of each piece, causing the whole slide model to be waaaaaaaaay out of alignment, and size!
The solution was to draw a polyline, that will split the drafted model from the regular version, and then combine the two versions into one.
The result worked great, draft on the outside edge, no draft on the inside edge!
I machined all 5 molds from HDU board, allowing me to zip through the material pretty quickly.
By the end of the day, I had the molds finished, cleaned up, and coated with a 2 part polyester hard-coat. 30 minutes in the sun, and they were rock hard and ready for final sanding.
They pulled really nice! The tight 90 degree molds are quite a bit taller than the rest, so removing the draft from the inside edges made popping the mold out a bit harder than the others. But a little baby powder rubbed onto mold solved most of the release issues.
By the time we left tonight, we had about 10 parts pulled. Because HDU is a foam insulator, it can retain the heat from the plastic for quite a while, so we have to mix it up a bit by cycling the molds around in order for them to cool down.
Only 60 more pulls to go! No really...........there's 70 sections..........
8)
JWO
The cool thing about our work is I NEVER know what will come next! Our latest job, which I have been a slave to the computer for at least a week, is a water slide! However, it will only be 1:6 scale.
It's for a commercial shoot the 3rd week of June. This will be a joint venture between full size waterslide sections, with live actors eventually being composited into our miniature slide.
The complicated part is making it look good. One would say "Why not build it like it is in real life?"
Fair enough, but in real life, a water slide is generally made from 2 half tubes that bolt to the next section. The downward angle is made by offsetting the joint between the two sections.
In real life, the tubes are covered, probably so people don't go flying out on the hair pin turns! Our slide needs to be open on the top to see the spokeswoman sliding down it. If I was to remove the top half of the above tubes, the edges would become stair-stepped (shown in red). WAAAAY to ugly to make it like that!
This means designing flanged tube sections, without any stair-stepping, that will align perfectly with whatever section they will join on to. And to be able to flip them for small covered sections, and still line up perfectly. All while maintaining a consistent downward spiral. And that's only the first part!
The second part is building a slide, that meets the mechanical requirement of support structures, without having the supports block any section of the tubing run, all while looking great as a whole. And it all has to work with the other elements that are being made at another shop!
This was a total PITA to design. The final agreed upon version was revision #27. That's a lot of revising! As a matter of fact, it was over 40 hours of revising!
As far as I know, this is the final scale version. The other problem I encountered about 26 times, was with every small change to the run, the whole thing gets changed down the line, forcing a complete re-build to satisfy everyone.
As the Art director uses Sketchup to design in 3D, I exported my final Hexagon model to Sketchup, allowing him to add it to the set model he was building for the rest of the commercial. The Sketchup Sally girl is just there for a scale reference.
I just have to prep my tube sections for import into Aspire, and I'm ready to machine. We will be vac-forming these section from .060"pet-g. I'm going to try hard-coated HDU for these molds, we'll see, but they should be good for a few pulls at least!
8)
JWO
