Dykes Moulding - CAD Files

If you’ve downloaded the Dykes Moulding CAD files from their website you may have noticed that the profiles are not to scale. From what I could see, the scale factor seems to be the same for all the files, approximately 0.056568174....
AutoCAD Blocks

Mirrored Flats: A Learning Experience

Found out a couple of pitfalls when building flats with mirrored acrylic skins. Our usual acrylic adhesive is a two part methacrylate based adhesive. It works incredibly well when bonding acrylic to just about any substrate (steel, wood, other plastics…) Some formulations cure to a relatively clear finish, which is quite the selling point. Unfortunately, we found that methacrylates will distort the mirror coating on mirrored plexi. Whoops. You can see the distortion in the picture below....
Solutions

Slick Edging

Here’s another choice for edging a deck and other scenic elements: paper. We recently did a production of Bad Dates and the designer wanted a smooth black finish for the “cut” edges of the walls and deck. Since the audience was sitting only four feet from the set, we experimented with wallpapering with a 50# black kraft paper. The advantages were as follows. the paper is thin enough to make the edges very clean the texture was very flat, smooth and consistent - much like bristol board....
Solutions

Stock Power Supplies for Effects

Here’s a quick post on using computer power supplies to power DC effects. Pull a power supply out of a computer and go to town! The most common computer power supplies (ATX form factor) provide several different DC voltages, such as +3v, -3v, +5v, -5v, +12v, and -12v. Mix and match between those specific wires or the common and you’ve got most of your onstage effects covered. For example, for our current show we’re using the +12v and -12v leads to power several 24v solenoid valves....
Solutions

The Guide to Sound Effects

For an excellent list of foley solutions, visit David Filskov’s The Guide to Sound Effects. Great list sorted in alphabetic order, highly recommended. Thanks to Valerie for pointing this out....

CADalyzer (AutoCAD Command Counter)

I’ve been working on a Ruby utility to analyze AutoCAD log files. The goal is to count how many times each command is invoked. The basic functionality is all in place, I’ve plans to add more in-depth analysis and perhaps even turn it into a web based tool. For now, you’ll have to download it and run it in the command line. If you want to run this, you’ll need the Ruby programming language runtime installed on your computer....
AutoCAD Code