Category Archives: How-to

Guides to building props or using certain techniques and materials

How-to

Bench from “Oscar”

Our final opera at this past season of the Santa Fe Opera was “Oscar”, a world premiere based on Oscar Wilde. I made a bench for it. It was a simple bench, and the legs were purchased rather than made by us, but it was all solid alder wood, and the end result was quite attractive.

Gluing up the seat
Gluing up the seat

I picked up a truckload of alder from the local lumber store, and planed and jointed some boards for the seat. The seat was a full inch thick, so it was quite hefty. After gluing them together, I rounded off the corners and routed a round-over along the whole circumference.

Hole-drilling jig
Hole-drilling jig

The trickiest part were the bars on either side which stood on top of the seat. I turned them out of the same alder I had bought. I then constructed a jig for drilling the holes. The jig allowed me to drill the hole exactly perpendicular to the bar, as well as to place the hole directly in the center (width-wise) of the bar. I also marked the bars so I could drill both holes along the same line.

Attaching the side bar
Attaching the side bar

Next, I had to line up the holes on the bars with the holes on the seat. The dowels connecting the bars to the bench were also turned by me out of alder. They ran through the top into the legs, so you could pick the bench up by the bars very securely.

For an extra touch, I fabricated the half-round molding along the bottom of the apron from the same alder I used on the rest of the bench. Since the legs we bought were also alder, this meant the entire bench was solid alder, and it would have a consistent appearance when stained.

Bench from "Oscar"
Bench from “Oscar”

The final bench was stained by our paint department; I had actually constructed two (the one above and a much longer one), but the second one was cut. Again, it was fairly simple, and the legs were not turned by me, but working in solid wood is always fun and interesting.

 

 

How-to

Cannon Carriages

In previous posts, I showed off some foam cannon barrels I built and some giant champagne bottles I helped work on for the Santa Fe Opera. I also built the four carriages they rode around on.

Cutting the shape
Cutting the shape

The main beams of the bases were cut out of plywood. I drew out a full-scale pattern for one of them and cut it out, then transferred it to all the pieces of plywood and cut those out to match. The bottom needed a square notch to hold the axle assembly, and it needed to be in the exact same location on all the pieces so the wheels would sit straight, so I attached all the pieces together and cut the notch out on all of them at once.

Assembling in the jig
Assembling in the jig

Next I built a jig to hold the beams. They sat at an angle and tapered out at the top. While in place, I measured and cut the cross pieces to fit exactly. This part took awhile to get perfectly correct, but once I had the pieces for one of them, I could just duplicate them for the other three carriages.

Attaching the facing
Attaching the facing

The carriages wanted to look like cast iron, so I faced all the edges with some strips of wood that were a little wider than the bases and rounded over on the ends. This gave it that look you might find on I-beams or similar pieces of metal. The photograph above shows a trick I read about that I wanted to try out: clamping a long strip of wood using rubber bands and spring clamps. It was not as effortless as I thought it would be, but it was a better clamping method than anything else I’ve used in the past.

Adding details
Adding details

With the major structure in place, I began adding details, like bolt heads and plates. These were all applied pieces; I cut and shaped the larger bolt heads out of MDF, while the smaller bolt heads were just short lag bolts that I screwed in.

Positioning the axles
Positioning the axles

The wheels we used were bought from a place that makes wooden carriage wheels; I’ve made wheels in the past, but it’s very time-consuming, and hard to make them as strong as a legit wooden wheel. I attached a pipe to each of the wheels as an axle, and found a slightly larger pipe that could sleeve over them. I welded this larger pipe to some plates so I could bolt it to the carriage. In the photo above, you can see the axle pipe is in two sections. When building a carriage like this, you need the wheels to be able to spin independently of each other, because when you make turns, they spin at different speeds. The long aluminum pipe going through both larger pipes in the photograph was used to line them up with each other while attaching them.

Cannon for Duchess of Gérolstein‎
Cannon for Duchess of Gérolstein‎

The whole thing got a pretty interesting paint treatment by the paint crew. Overall, it was a very fun project that saw a lot of stage time during the performance. It was also interesting to compare it to the previous cannon I have built, which could not be more different than this one both in appearance and in methods of construction.

How-to

Foam Cannon Barrels

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Last week, I showed off some giant champagne bottles I made, and mentioned that they would act as the barrels of some cannons I was also building at the Santa Fe Opera. Today, I will show you the actual cannon barrels I made. We needed four cannons, so that meant four barrels.

Bandsaw Cutting Jig
Bandsaw Cutting Jig

I made the barrels out of foam to keep them lightweight; the Santa Fe Opera runs their shows in repertory, so any savings in weight is much appreciated by the running crew, who have to move all the props from the basement to the stage on a daily basis. I whipped up a quick jig for the bandsaw to cut the corners from the blocks of foam I got. This meant less time turning, less dust, and it allowed the foam to actually fit on the lathe.

Turned barrels
Turned barrels

I designed a full-size template of the shape of the barrels based on the designer’s sketches and my own research. I could also use this template as a pattern on the lathe to make all four barrels exactly the same as each other. Turning foam on the lathe is fun and easy, but it makes a gigantic mess.

Coating and sanding
Coating and sanding

After the barrels were taken off the lathe, I began the long and laborious process of coating and sanding them. The designer wanted them to look like smooth brass without any distressing, so they needed to be absolutely flawless. I used Aqua Resin, which provided a sandable hard coat with far less toxicity than Bondo. I spent nearly a week just coating and sanding all these guys.

Drilling straight through
Drilling straight through

I built a jig so I could hold the barrel and a cordless drill perpendicular to each other. This provided a pilot hole for the trunnion I would add; the trunnion would be a piece of PVC pipe which would hold the cannon on the carriage and allow it to pivot up and down.

Hole
Hole

With the pilot hole drilled, I switched to a hole saw that was closer to the size of the PVC pipe. You can see in the photo above that I have an extra long pilot bit on the hole saw. This bit was long enough to pop out the other side of the barrel so I could be sure that the hole saw would exit in exactly the right place.

Finished Barrels
Finished Barrels

I pushed the sections of PVC pipe through the hole and capped off the ends to make them look like a solid bar. I also added some lauan rings to the ends of the barrels to help reinforce them when they were standing up.

Painted Barrels
Painted Barrels

With the barrels finished, I handed them off to the painters, who gave them the great brass paint treatment that you see above. In a few days, I’ll post about how I built the carriages to these cannons, and you can see pictures of the final piece.

How-to

Giant Champagne Bottles

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With this summer’s season at the Santa Fe Opera at an end, I can begin to show off some of the props I’ve built there. First up is a giant champagne bottle.

We needed four champagne bottles of a very specific size; they were going to be the barrels of cannons that I would also build. Nobody manufactures champagne bottles that large, so we had to make them. Since we would vacuum-form them from plastic, I began by making a solid foam bottle.

Blank and pattern
Blank and pattern

I drew out half the shape at full-scale on a piece of plexiglass. We have a duplicator on our lathe, which allows us to rough out the shape by directly following a pattern like this. I also got the block of foam ready. This piece was so wide, it barely fit on the lathe; I had to take most of the attachments off and round off the foam by hand before there was enough room to put the attachments back on.

Turning foam
Turning foam

As you can imagine, turning a block of foam this large creates quite a bit of debris. I am still finding bits of foam in my clothes to this day.

Splitting the foam in half
Splitting the foam in half

To vacuum form this piece, I only needed half of the bottle. I built a box so I could hold the bottle straight. The top of the box reached the exact middle point of the bottle, so when I ran a hot wire along it, it sliced the foam bottle directly in half.

Vacuum formed half
Vacuum formed half

I mounted the foam onto a board and drilled holes all around the circumference, as well as holes in the concave portions to ensure the plastic would be sucked all the way down. I also coated the foam with Aqua Resin and sanded it smooth. I posted a video a few weeks ago showing the vacuum forming machine in action; check it out if you want to see how I made the piece in the photo above.

Painting the halves
Painting the halves

With a successful pull on the vacuum former, this project was turned over to the crafting department, and my work on it ended. They began manufacturing clear plastic halves like you see above, and spraying them down with green dye to match the color of a real champagne bottle.

Finished bottles
Finished bottles

They glued the halves together and added some labels and gold foil to complete the look. The final bottles were over four feet tall.

 

 

How-to

Turned Quaich

One of the props I built for our production of La Donna del Lago was a quaich. A quaich is a two-handled drinking vessel from Scotland; you can find out more on the Wikipedia page, which incidentally, has the research photograph I worked from.

Full-scale drawing
Full-scale drawing

I began by adapting the research photograph to a full-scale drawing of the profile I would make. This was fit to the measurements that they wanted to use, shown to the designer, then refined some more based on his feedback. When my drawing was approved, I cut a turning blank from a piece of poplar we had laying around.

Turning the outside
Turning the outside

This was the first time I have ever turned a bowl on a lathe. Our lathe is not actually set up to turn on the outboard side, so I had to turn the whole bowl on the inboard side. I began by turning the profile of the outside, leaving a large foot on the bottom that I could hold on to when it came time to turn the inside.

Hollowing out the inside
Hollowing out the inside

I flipped the bowl around and started hollowing out the inside. One of the other carpenters told me a trick where you first use a drill bit to remove as much of the material on the inside as you can. I grabbed the largest Forstner bit we had, stuck it in the drill bit chuck on the tailstock, and drilled out the center of my bowl.

Finished turning
Finished turning

Hollowing out the rest of the center was straightforward once I got used to how the tools acted. The tricky part about turning a bowl, compared to turning spindles, is the way the grain faces. The curve brings you from face grain to end grain, so your tool cuts differently as you move along the curve.

Unpainted quaich
Unpainted quaich

After the bowl itself was complete, I added the handles. I chiseled and Dremeled a square notch in each side of the bowl that the handles could fit into, and epoxied them in place. I also took a grinder and carved the outside so it looked like it was hand-carved with gouges.

Quaich
Quaich

The painting and faux metal strip along the top was handled by the rest of the props team. It was sealed with a food-safe sealer since the artists drank actual liquid from it every performance. It was a simple prop, but it turned out nicely and allowed me to learn some new skills in the process.