Week 141 (Music Room Cloud, Part 2)

This past week we passed a critical ceiling/electrical inspection, enabling us to connect power to our Music Room Cloud:

It’s always good to test that the lights work in daylight so that if there’s a problem, there’s enough light to fix it.  But the real test–the test that tells you whether the lighting program is actually doing its job is the test run at night:

In the following photo we have the two West circuits on and the two East circuits off (hence the darkness to the right):

And here we have all the circuits on:

Here’s an example of having just one circuit on:

Because of the automatic exposure of the camera, it is difficult to tell much difference between this photo and the prior one with two circuits on, other than the fact that half the lights are obviously not on, but in absolute terms it is about 1/3rd as bright.  The circuit which is off in the above photo drives 120W halogen lamps and the circuit that is on drives 70W halogen lamps.  Halogens are at their most efficient when burning at full power, so we can achieve three lighting levels (210W, 360W, and 570W) per cloud element without any efficiency losses to dimming whatsoever.  Of course all these circuits will be fully dimmable, so we can run from 0-100% on the 70W circuit, switch over to 50-100% on the second circuit, and then if we want more, still be efficient by running one of the two circuits at 100% and dimming the other circuit to taste.  This is very much more efficient than being forced to run all lamps from a common dimmer, and it gives a much better color temperature for video.

It should be noted that the cloud is actually way above normal eye level.  Here’s an example of what you’d see as you walk from Sound Lock 1 into the Music Room toward Booth A:

You have to really position yourself carefully to see the glare of the lights:

But you don’t have to!

Moving along, Booth B and C have been prepared for sanding:

Actually, the product we are using for the floors is so flat and so consistent that we’re likely going to bypass what would be a normal sanding process and go right to buffing.  We’ll know Monday what we’ll actually choose, but the less we sand the first time around, the more life the floor carries with it down the road.

And if it wasn’t already obvious, we’ve got half of our 1380 sq ft of floor covered with Advantech, meaning that somebody drilled nearly 700 holes in the subfloor and concrete.  Ouch!

Over in the Annex, the ductwork progresses, with the supply-side work getting done first:

A sketch is made of where the supplies will be cut into the East soffit supply:

And then the cuts are made, more ductwork fabricated, and then all are framed:

All the way around…

And now for something completely different…

It is our hope to be able to open the facility by the end of the year, which as of today means in about 14 weeks time.  To help keep track of whether we’re on schedule for that or not, I thought it would be helpful to compare and contrast where we were 14 weeks ago, and see whether it looks like we really are halfway to the goal line or not.  For example, this week we poured the footings for the pergola we’re going to build:

14 weeks ago we were making adjustments to the footings for our patio:

We’ll see in the coming weeks whether it looks like the progress we’re making on any given week really does look like we’re at least half the distance to the goal line.  I hope we make the schedule!

Have a restful weekend, and enjoy this image of the studio lit by moonlight (!) under the North Carolina night sky:

(Hand-held, 3 seconds @ f2.8, ASA 1600, image slightly cleaned up with GIMP; click image to see original)