My "Out of Africa" theater is "FINISHED" - Page 3

Hi Queenie, thank you so much for the kind words. Yes I have a GREAT wife! She knew this was a big dream of mine since we met way back in 1999 and supports me in it. She loves movies as well but not as fanatic about movie watching as I am - she'll be ok with watching a flick on a 20" tv with the internal speakers -

Misugrad, (Mike) the floortiles will be covered with carpet as well as the stage and the riser. The columns and soffits will be stuffed with pink stuff and the walls will be covered with sound absorbing panels (fibreglass or fibreboard) and fabric streched over panels. The outside walls of the HT are double brick walls (firewall) plastered on both sides and going up to the roof tiles, so basically it's sealed of from the rest of the house. The sleeping rooms are also far from the HT with a second firewall going up to the roof between them and the kitchen.

The roof is Harveytiles - a type of sheetmetal covering in the shape of normal cement tiles - very srong but keeps no noise in or out and makes the attic above the HT as hot as an oven. I took out the insulation that was in the attic before while cleaning it. I'm still undecided with what to do to insulate the attic space. I am thinking of putting blow in cellulose fibre of about 4" thick onto the ceiling in the attic and also attaching something like the pink stuff to the underside of the roof itself.

The HT itself will have a solid wood door and the foyer part another - so double wood doors to the rest of the house - hope its enough.

There will also be bass traps in the front corners as well as the whole screenwall covered in insulation and the two back columns will also act as traps stuffed with insulation.

Will

New pics!

The "cross-braces" in the underside of the soffits are all glued in place. The openings will be covered with a fabric panel and will each hold a LED dimmable downlight.




And here's a "Behind the Screen" picture:

The screen will fit inside the pine frame in the screenwall. The screen frame is ordered from an aluminium (or aluminum for the US of A'ers) company that makes window frames and doors ect. It will be constructed out of 2X2" aluminium square tubing. This will be covered with a white weaved screen material similar to sheerweave thats available in the US. As said before the screen ratio will be 2:1 3m X 1,5m (120" x 60"). This will give me a 16:9 screen of 122" diagonal, a 2.39:1 screen of 128" diagonal and a 4:3 screen of 100" diagonal. The masking system with velvet covered panels will frame off the different ratios horisontally and vertically. The screen may be a bit to big for my first row seats but I will have to wait and see!! What's the saying: "Go BIG or go home!"

The screen frame arrived:
The guy at the aluminium shop was kind enough to drop it off at my home. I had the option to have it in black or regular grey, so you can guess wich colour I chose. You can't believe how light the frame is but yet VERY strong and sturdy - it won't pull skew under the tension of the screen material.




The frame is just standing in place - the screen material will only be put over it when all the "dirty, dusty work" is finished.

This it the front lefthand corner where the front column will go

I made the masking system horizontal panels. I used aluminium U channel and correx board for the construction. The correx fit inside the channel and the corners is fastened with corner brackets and rivets. They must be quite sturdy but lightweight since the span will be more than 3m (10') so they must not sag in the centre. The panels will be covered with black velvet once they fit propperly and the HT is more clean and dust free.

Here's a pic of the correx being cut. (Note that my trusty anvil is always at hand for when a pesky cartoon character comes by and I need to drop it on its head )



Here's one of the cut correx. This stuff statically attracts every little dust particle in the air and from the floor



I wonder if the "health and safety officer" will approve of my bench drill stand?
(it actually once nearly toppled over but I caught it just in time )


I used duct tape to secure the correx on the backside to the U-channel and also used glue inside the channel

Here is the top horizontal mask fitted to the sliders.


Here they are connected to each other with nylon rope over pulleys. If the one goes UP the other goes DOWN. Very smooth - I'm happy


You might have noticed that the panels are not the same height. Little error on my side I've made the bottom mask first, fitted nice and all but forgot that the screen is not in the centre of the screenwall between the procenium and stage, but a bit higher up. It was such a big job to put the mask together so I just let it be and made the top one smaller to fit the space above the screen - you won't even know they differ once the fabric wall in up in front of the masks

But you won't tell now, will you? Let's just keep it between friends

calimark, "Keep Watching This Space!"

Thanx Woolly, I love your nice theater, especially that great woodwork.

Now what have we got here?



A 'lil clue above the green thingy


O.K. so it works with a remote!

Yes!! The startings of my Mask-O-Matic Super-Dooper don't lift your butt of your chair masking system changer !!

Second ingredient:
We'll need 9 of these


Third ingredient:
We'll need 4 of these


Fourth ingredient:
2 of these will do


Let's leave it at this Cliffhanger for now!

Dankie (thank you) Dirkie.

PS. Welcome to the forum and madness of HT building!!

Calimark, YES! that was my original plan, but I came up with something simpler and faster. The threaded rod moved the nut too slow - about 12cm in 24 seconds I tried the fastest motor I could get, but still stong enough (270 rpm), and it was still to slow. Sometimes it's better to not over-engineer something I'll post pics soon!!

Wow Pete, nice room, I've just checked out your build and it's looking good. I was looking for an IR kit ready-built but to no avail, so I built the kit at work between helping customers. I cant believe it worked the first time I tested it

The masking saga continues...........

The side masking or vertical masks is constructed a little bit different than the horizontals. They are also made with aluminium U-channel and corner brackets same as hor. but instead of using the correx I chose to use meranti wood cover strips inside the channel to strengthen the frame. This is done 'cause the side panels must be accoustically transparent since they will move in front of the main L+R speakers when they are masking for 4:3. The material will be wrapped around the panels and fixed (glued or stapled) to the wood strips.



Sorry that there is not more pictures of the different steps involved in making the things because I sometimes forget to take pics when I'm on a working-spree





In the pictures you can see the sliders that'll go on the screenwall and the sliding parts already fixed with rivets to the panels.

Thank you RT. I hope it turns out as planned.

Kevin, I live WAY up north-east from Grahamstown near Pretoria. I hope you enjoyed your stay in SA.

In the previous posts I showed the pic of the unbuilt pc board and components. After soldering everything together at work throughout the day it actually worked.

Just a before pic:


And the after:


Then I spend 4 hours into the night at the kitchen table putting everything together. It went from this pic where I got all the stuff ready for assembly:



To this (looks like a bowl of spagetti overturned on the thing!)


This is basically the "brains" of the masking system. At the points marked A to G next to the connector blocks the wires will go to the different limit/micro switches for the panels. The fixed stops will be for horizontal mask at 16:9 and 2.35 or if a movie is played with a narrower aspect like 2.40 I can manually drop it down to fit. The same goes for the vertical masks. The fixed stops will be at 2.35, 16:9 and 4:3 or any in between.

At the two upper left connector blocks, the two geared motors will be connected.

The power for the motors and the IR relay board comes from 1 wall-wart 12v power supply plugged into the setup at the top right.

I just used 7 of the 12 relays on the board, so that means there is still 5 left to connect other stuff to!

You must be wondering why I went through all the trouble to make this thing when I could've just used 2 Somfy electric blind/curtain motors? Easy answer - there is just one place in SA that imports them and they are VERY expensive,...........so.........here we are now!

Pete, I'll see what I can do. It's gonna be a huge task to put on paper what is floating around in this overworked brain of mine

Here we have the masks in place:
It's masked here to 4:3


And here we have it masked to 16:9


And here it's masked to 2.35:1



Everthing works smoothly when it's opperated by hand. The first step of the automation will start next - connecting the motors to the cables to move the masks!

Thank you RT. I will post a vid as soon as everything is up and running.

You've asked for it, you got it!

http://youtu.be/128vITyKL-A

Please excuse the poor quality of the clip. I was so excited to see it work so I just snapped the vid with my phone ( will post a better video later) to show you guys!