The Devil's Disciple images
So how the hell do you make a smooth-running revolve on a sadly uneven stage?
If you've done carpentry for the theater, the picture at left gives you the whole answer. Once you shim the casters to a common level, the floor isn't uneven any more.
This revolve comes in big pieces, a hub section and 15 or 16 segments shaped like slices of pie. It's all cunningly constructed so that the segments interlock with the hub and one another. That isn't to say it was not heavy work; each segment is about 4 feet by 8 feet and made of plywood an inch and a half thick. One person can carry a piece, but it has to be a profoundly dumb person.
Note to self: Next time, write down the radius of each ring of casters. It's important not to drive screws into the disk that will collide with the wheels.
One ring carries the hub. Three rings support the pie pieces. The first photo on this page shows just two of these outer rings; the last one was inserted later. I think we installed 60-odd wheels.
And then you start laying it down. The pivot in the center of the hub is just a lateral thrust bearing. Well, it's just two pieces of pipe. My point is, it doesn't carry any weight; the wheels take all the load. At right you see the hub before it was set in place. You can't make out the holes predrilled in the hub for a lot of carriage bolts. Each segment will be joined to the hub by one bolt and joined to its neighbors by three or four others.
You can just barely see that the hub has a slot running all around its perimeter. Each pie piece has a tongue of 3/4 inch plywood that fits into the slot. The top and bottom of the hub are made of 3/8 inch plywood, with 3/4 in between.
Second note to self: Next time, take notes on the correct order of assembly. Someone did this before, but they wrote all the information on the bottom of a pie piece so it would become invisible as soon as the project got started.
Each pie piece is like a badly made fast-food sandwich with 3/8 inch bread and 3/4 inch filling. The bread hangs over on one side and the filling hangs over on the other. When you put in a unit, its filling slides between the extra bread on one side, and its bread leaves a slot for the filling of the next piece.
Everything's drilled for carriage bolts. At left you see Brooke (with the cute shoes), Matt (white T-shirt) and Andy (blue shirt) assembling the revolve. They didn't have to support the weight of each new piece because it could rest on the wheels, but they did have to reach way under each new piece to put the nuts on the bolts.
This looks like an enormous job, but two things: They did it so well that we had no adjustments to make, and from bare floor to working revolve took less than a day.
I know, this is far more than you ever wanted to know about revolves. But it was fascinating to study the thing and help put it together, and it was such a wonderful addition to our repertoire of techniques that I thought it was worth recording a lot of detail . . . and there's more on the next page (only a little).
| Previous image | Image index | Next image |
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Images