The Star..... of DAVID!! (Jewish Bar-Mitzvah Scene) and a Trolley sink thing.

Over the last 2 Thursday practical sessions we have made progress on 2 main thing really, because we are still waiting for the scenic flats to arrive. There were two pieces of set that we knew we would be able to build quickly and check them off the list of things to do. We came to this conclusion because we had alot of wood left over from a piece of set used during 'Dracula' that were perfect for the Star of David and we already had spare pieces of wood that were right for the construction of the trolley being used for sinks.


The Trolley: (Unfortunately I only have 1 photo of this, and its of a wheel!)

This one piece of set is used during 2 scenes in the show, both time they are meant to look like sinks, as a group we decided that putting the whole thing on wheels would make it so much easier to bring on and off of stage. We just drilled on 4 dolly wheels that were stripped from the piece of set the wood originally was used for. These were easily fixed onto the frame work that I built. I worked on just the concept of constructing a basic frame.
I found this image on Google when looking at possibilities. I used this as my basic guide and it worked out for me because I managed to get the whole frame measured, cut to size, and assembled within 2 hours. I stuck to this design pretty much just adding on some extra supports along the top of the trolley where the sinks were going to be glued just for extra support if someone decided to lean on it. We managed to find some ply board in the cupboard for the top and the side pieces that we needed, we then cut this down to size using a jig-saw.
When it came to using the jig-saw we clamped it safely to to of the work benches away from everyone else in the room, I then wore protective goggles and a mask to stop any dust getting in my eyes or mouth, after cutting out the piece I packed the jig-saw away and unplugged it so no-one hurt themselves.
The plyboard was unfortunately bent and warped so we placed them on the floor and placed heavy tubs of paint on them to try and flatten them out, this worked out for the 2 top sections but didn't work for the sides and front sections which were to warped and were refusing to flatten out.
(In the end we had spare canvas left over from the scenic flats which we then used to cover the front and sides of this piece of set.)

(Here is me using the jig-saw and then me trying to flatten the plyboard before cutting it)

The Star..... of DAVID:
This massive and also essential Star of David is used during the Jewish Bar-Mitzvah Scene, it is there purely to show the audience that it is a Bar-Mitzvah. When it came to the construction of this because it was a case of finding stuff to do instead of wasting production time we used what ever wood was available to us.
In the end we plan to paint the Star a light blue, with possible some white to it as well, first of course we will give it a base coat of white because the wood is black at the moment.

Thankfully there just happened to be enough wood to make a complete star. We layed out all of the bits of wood swapping them around so it looked vaguely symmetrical  we weren't going to put hours of work into this because it is on for about 2 minutes during the show. Once we had sorted out the shape of the star we went about glueing each bit of wood together at the joints, we used wood glue because it is strong and is 1 million times better than PVA.
After we left the glue for a couple of minutes me and mark went around drilling screws into each joint as well to give it that final support. We experienced alot of cracking of the wood when we were drilling but we resolved this by putting wood glue into the cracks and letting it harden, this then strengthened the weak spots.

 (Here are me and mark working on the construction of the Star of David)