Roaring Fork Cinema construction thread - Page 9

Got it. I totally agree about keeping it clean. My current plan is to measure and cut fabric in the finished space outside the theater, as well as to cover up the floor in the theater after cleaning and removing the vast majority of my tools and mess. The only hassle for me is that I'll build my screen wall after fabric (to hide the staples holding the fabric to the side wall furring strips), so I'll need to cut those pieces in the garage.

I'm mostly concerned about carpet damaging fabric already on the wall when the installer is working with it.

-Ryan

Thanks for the reminder! I recall that, and in fact we've looked at your carpet pics before as an example of something we liked. Who made the black carpet you used?

-Ryan

Thanks for dropping in Bryan. I was able to get the other 4 sheets of JM814 1" that I need this morning with no difficulty. I have the "left" wall completely prepped for treatments and I'm moving around the room. I also have my plan in place for furring strips and fabrics to I have a picture of how to get all the fabric on the walls.

One thing I completely forgot was to run a 3.5mm mono cord for the IR repeater to the GE location. I had opened this area up once to fix a problem with the low-voltage run to the entry switch and it looks like I'll need to open it one more time to get the IR plug in place. My GE arrives today so I'll take a look and confirm I know what cable I need, then I'll test it out. I suppose that means I should order my remote to verify it all plays nicely. Fun fun. I don't remember if I said it before, but I plan on the Logitech Harmony 1000 with the RF extender to control my devices. I'll get an extension cable for both the GE and the projector.

-Ryan

This weekend I was able to finish up the remainder of my furring strips and put the majority of my acoustic treatments up. I also ran conduit from my GE location into my equipment closet for IR control (I can't believe I forgot that!)

My cables all arrived Thursday so I'm ready to pull wires through conduit this week. I'll also patch the drywall around the GE for a second time, and finish putting my 1" OC on the side wall. I will also work on my light tray this week.

Here are the pictures:

I've insultated every wall, to getting this conduit in place wasn't particularly easy. I don't have a shot of the other end yet, but I need to re-do the drywall around the box there anyway. I'll get that done this week.


1" JM814 (OC703 equivalent) on the side walls in the back and 1" acoustical cotton up front. I used brick-mold around my door which added an additional reveal and was also 1" thick. I cut the excess trim off with my table saw.


!" on the other side too. Once I finish this up, I'll add my scrim to the lower section as well - both sides and the rear wall.


Rear wall with 2" JM814. The "T" shapes on the wall are mount points for brackets which will hold up my rear speakers. I won't staple fabric here.


250' of speaker wire ready to be pulled.


-Ryan

Last night I started pulling speaker wire. I pull my first 12g wire from the equipment closet to the front-right corner through 3/4" conduit with little difficulty. Then I tried pulling the 2nd run to that same location (one for my right channel, one for my center.) DOH! This was much more difficult. I ended up breaking the pull-string (rated at 100lbs or something) twice before I gave up. I pulled both sections out and pull them together at the same time. Genius! This worked much better. Then I ran the second run to the front left with the wire for my left channel and subwoofer. Surprisingly this was easier than the first run - perhaps due to the rigidity of the sub cable. I ran one last run to my ride side speaker (in 1/2" conduit) which was easy as well.

The morale of the story here is to run larger conduit or just pull your speaker wires before you get drywall up. Not sure what I was thinking but hopefully someone can learn from my mistakes. 3/4" works but it would be better for a single wire.

I also finished the conduit run from GE to equipment closet for my IR run. I haven't made the drywall patch yet, that's tonight. I'll get some new pictures up tonight or tomorrow.

-Ryan

My sconces arrived at the shop yesterday and I picked them up today. I'm going to review how they mount to make sure the way I blocked for fabric will work well. I'll post pictures of the lights and how they mount.

In the last day I also made a couple of other purchases. First, I secured my Sony Black Pearl (VPL-VW60.) I also purchased a power conditioner (Monster HTS3600.) I was torn between this and the Belkin, but I got the right deal on this unit. I also purchased a Denon 3808ci AVR and a Logitech Harmony 1000 remote and RF extender. I'll have it all in hand tonight.

It is time to put that projector in place to measure screen size (and then quickly take it down and put it away!) This will help me firm up screen size so I can build my false wall.

I'll do a test of IR control from the Harmony to the GE soon (hopefully tonight or tomorrow if I get industrious.)

-Ryan (my wallet is much lighter today!)

I got my remaining speaker wire pulled last night and about half of the scrim installed. I also finished my drywall patch for my GE / IR conduit. But... I got my new toys! The pictures speak for themselves and my motivation to get this done is in high gear now.

-Ryan

Thanks guys! I was totally a kid in a candy store with this stuff. I was sad to put it back in the box and then leave the boxes put away. I'm so close to putting up fabric that I can taste it.

-Ryan

As motivated as I am, progress feels so slow! I worked a few hours last night and finished up my scrim application. I also finished with my side wall treatments and furring strips around my Grafik Eye location. Finally I furred out the remaining items on my front soffit. Here are the pics from last night:





The three lights and vents are up front of my screen wall, the other two are behind. I need to add more blocking to 2" thick for the rear two lights, as I'm putting up 2" insulation on the soffit between the front and false walls.


-Ryan

Thanks for the note! The equipment is totally the driving factor to get this thing done. It is making my wife crazy that I want to spend each and every waking moment away from work and our kids down in the HT.

I've heard from a few quiet readers (not that many posters here.- (post!)) I hope what I'm posting is valuable or interesting to someone. I thought about the wire-lube thing, but it was after 9 and my big-box stores were closed and I was determined. I definitely should have pull the speaker wire first and left the conduit open for expansion. I can't explain why I didn't do that though.

-Ryan

Thanks Chris! I signed up for the Tom Logan Challenge in his thread. That guy ain't got nothin' on me!

I heard from Roman (rsh) that my 2nd row of seating will be shipped soon and I'll have it in a couple of weeks. Just in time!

-Ryan

Yep the scrim was pretty quick. Bryan helped me determine a materials list and I bought the cotton and scrim through him directly. I sourced the insulation locally to save on shipping. In my case I used 25' of scrim and adhered it with 3m 77 spray glue. Total time of the job was about 90 minutes.

-Ryan

I made lots of progress this weekend. Thankfully my wife agreed to watch the kids most of the weekend while I hid in the basement and worked. I'll break-up my progress into several posts. Here's what I did:

• Finished planing down rack opening to get the rack to fit nicely.
• Additional furring for fabric prep.
• Grafik Eye QS and wallstation installed and tested with Harmony 1000 remote and RF Extender.
• Light tray construction and installation (50%)
• Projector test for screen size and determined I didn't want to use my projector box.
• Removed projector box, drywall repair.
  

My opening was 19 1/8" - the right size, but in a couple of places the rack was just too tight to fit. I used a hand planer and widened the opening at the tight spots so the rack fit nicely. I wanted to make sure I got this done before I put fabric up. Here are a couple of shots of the rack in place, flush with the furring strips for fabric. I will put fabric on the strips all around and cover the face of those strips with door casing trim.





I put 1" furring up to mount my side speakers. I won't staple to these, but I'll drill the mounting screws through the fabric to this wood to hold up the speakers. I didn't take an "after" shot, but I moved the opening for the speaker wire to the center of the mounting location so it will sit behind the speaker and be nicely hidden.



-Ryan

I also got to work on my light tray and put about half of it up. I used 3/4" MDF. The bottom is 8" wide and the side is 2 1/4". I left 1 1/2" between the tray and the wall to leave plenty of room for my stapler to fit when I wrap fabric from the wall around the tray and again from that location to the top of the soffit where it meets the ceiling. Once fabric is in place I will put crown moulding on the face of the tray and finally I will lay blue rope light in the tray. I have an outlet up by the tray in the back left corner. The outlet is wired to my Grafik Eye.

Here's a picture of the detail:



-Ryan

The next bit of fun was to test out my Grafik Eye. I wanted to be sure that the IR solution I have works properly before I get fabric up and opening the wall is much more difficult. First I cut power to my circuit and disconnected my temporary switch. Then I tested each of the 6 zones on that temporary switch to make sure there were no shorts. After that I connected all the power to the GE QS and the PELV for the wallstation to the GE and the wallstation. Then I used a 6' mono cable from my local Radio Shack to connect the to the IR input of the GE. The cable I found had a 3.5mm plug on one end and open wire on the other. Perfect! I need to find heat shrink to make this code safe.

After I got it all connected and the power back on, I pressed the magic button and amazingly all the lights came on! *whew*. I grabbed my remote and tried the all-lights-off and all-lights-on buttons and it worked! Yay! I have remote programming to do, but I'm satisfied that my solution will work. I also tested the wall-switch and that worked too. Once that was done I disconnected it all and put the toys away. I'm back to my ghetto light switch until fabric is up.

Wired in place and resting on a piece of wood to not stress the wires behind:


Top-down view:


Wiring detail. I will trim down the bare wires here so they're not exposed when I do the final install.


Ghetto IR connection. My Logitech RF extender hanging by the IR run into the conduit to the GE. Note my stellar drywall repair skills.


The QS wallstation:


The QS wallstation wiring detail. I will trim the bare wires down to they're not exposed like this:


-Ryan

The decision to box in my projector was weighing on me, and I wasn't comfortable with my screen size decision. I needed to break out the projector and test for screen size and make a final decision on the projector box. So... I busted out a ghetto-screen aka a WalMart sheet:



Then I setup the projector on a TV tray and used my amp and one of my side surrounds for a center channel. I brought my XBox 360 down for a 1080i (best I have right now) test of 16:9 and 2.35:1 content.



I fired up the projector and *wow*. I'm thrilled and this is on a completely unfinished room on a bed sheet. Only 200 thread count. Imagine if I went for 400! Pictures of the "screen" were taken in auto mode on my camera rested on a tripod and the kit lens. I have a Canon Digital Rebel XTi.





I zoomed to match the image height of the 2.35:1 projected image of the movie. I don't have a lens, so this was just to gauge screen size.



After all that, I decided that it wasn't worth risking my projector to put it in the box I had constructed. So I cut it out and proceeded with drywall repair.



I'm totally torn on screen size now. My screen can be 9' wide. At 2.35:1 that's 46" tall and ~118" diagonal. Keeping a constant height setup, that makes 16:9 ~82" wide by 46" tall and ~93.5" diagonal.

If I keep the 9' width and make that my 16:9 size, then just project the black bars for 2.35:1 content and have a 108" by 60" 16:9 screen at 124" diagonal!

I realize this is a personal preference issue, but what do you (my readers!) think?

-Ryan

~10'4" from the front row to the screen. We both tend to sit relatively close in movie theaters as well. Typically about a 1:1 ratio of screen width to our eyes - sometimes slightly further back.

-Ryan

Thaniks loma! Since I pulled the projector box idea, I have more flexibility here. Distance from screen to my rear wall (after treatments) is 202" (16'10"). My soffit is ~30" deep. The lens will be between 14' (slightly forward of the soffit) to 15' (slightly recessed in the soffit.)

-Ryan

Audixium,

Yep, that's still where I'm leaning. We watch probably 50/50 TV (16:9) and movies (2.35:1) today, with a little extra TV during football season. I expect that I won't watch all the TV I watch now in my living room, down in the HT. I will watch all the movies I watch in the HT though, so that means I'm more like 1/3 TV to 2/3 movies, which suggests the 2.35:1 screen size is the way to go. I shouldn't have projected the full 16:9 size at that same width though.

-Ryan

Just a brief update. I was out of town for several days including last weekend. The last two nights I all but finished my light tray. The remaining piece along the back is constructed and will be put up once my fabric tracks arrive (they were ordered yesterday.)

I spent last night removing the vast majority of tools and junk from my room. I cleaned up and have covered about half of the floor in preparation for fabric. Tonight I plan to do fabric on the front wall. This weekend I hope to do the side and rear walls. Then I can install the sconces and Grafik Eye.

I ordered a few other miscellaneous pieces including some IR extensions to reach my projector, some heat-shrink tubing I need to wire up my Grafik Eye, and the inlet I need for my projector power.

I'll take updated pictures tonight.

-Ryan