Marc Alan Goodman’s Building Strange Weather Blog: Framing & Wiring

Latest in the “Building Strange Weather Blog” series by producer/engineer and studio owner Marc Alan Goodman. Click to start at Step 1: Finding A New Home; #2: Design; #3: Waiting For Permits (Part 1) and #4: (Part 2); and #5: Stops & Starts, #6: Demolition, #7: The Structural Work, #8 The Joys of Home Ownership, #9 Rain, Rain, Rain, #10 A Control Room Is Born, #11 Plumbing Inspections aka More Delays, and #12 The Timing Game…

Now that we’re in the swing of things again it’s hard to find time to sit down and write. Since my last update a lot has happened.

First, Tony and the studio contractor crew came up from North Carolina to frame out the iso booths, lounge, and the remainder of the control room wall. Calling them contractors doesn’t really do their work justice, It’s closer to fine woodworking. For a week I worked as a grunt moving trash around, locating materials and sitting in the van making sure it didn’t get parking tickets, but I got a chance to watch some truly amazing work.

I’ve never even heard of a contractor taking down a piece due to a ¼” variation, much less the 1/32” that Tony’s crew work to, and the angle measurements they worked with went to four decimal places. The attention to detail was astounding, and the framing itself looks beautiful.

Wiring!

Next up was Thom Canova, also from North Carolina, who came up to install the technical wiring. He, his assistant Dominick and myself spent another week running thousands of feet of cable. The runs inside the control room are easy and can be pulled after the floor and walls are installed, but the cable running to the various input panels needed to be put in place, as well as all the access boxes around the studio.

There are two main boxes in the live room on either side, but there are additional panels mounted in the control room, sound lock, both iso booths, the lounge, bathroom, basement, and my apartment upstairs just in case things get really crazy. My plan is to make sure that there is never any reason to have to install more cabling.

We started out by running a length of 4” PVC pipe from the machine room, through a hole in the cement in to the basement, and up the length of the building. The piece connecting the machine room and basement has been in place for months and wasn’t installed with any specific placement in mind. Getting it to connect to the rest of the studio was a bit of a challenge and required a number of 45-degree bends. This made it significantly more difficult to pull the cable through.

We hung the reels of cable up on a makeshift contraption made from ladders, pipe, shovels, and other various things we found around the site, and pulled it in bunches through to the booths. We spent the second day mostly shaking the pipes and trying to jam the fish tape back through in order to pull more cable and realized we would need an additional route to the machine room. So the general contracting crew came back in to knock out a huge square of the cement floor, right next to all of our exposed cabling, install two more 4” PVC pipes, and fill it back up with cement. It caused a little bit of down time but we had plenty of work to do prepping and measuring the boxes.

Once the second pipe was installed the job became significantly easier. I ran off to do a mix session, and didn’t notice that Thom and Dominick stayed at the space until about 3:30 AM in order to wrap things up and head home. I have to say that paying to bring Wes [Lachot]’s crews up from North Carolina has been well worth it, and the project’s not even finished yet. Their insights in interpreting the plans alone have saved me thousands of dollars.

Installing boxes where we’ll mount connectors

So now, for the first time in the last year and half, I find myself with a serious timetable for completion. Tony and his crew need to come up two more times, and Thom one more time before the studio is complete. Plus they’re all working on other studios, including one in Chicago (which is supposed to be awesome) that is also coming to a head right now, so a slight slip in the schedule on my end could mean loosing the crews for weeks.

Tony’s next job is to frame all of the soffits, which both insulate the HVAC ducts and provide bass trapping, but before he can come do that the walls need to be sheet-rocked.

Yesterday the electricians finished installing the switch and outlet boxes, and Daniel and I spent the day with fireproofing putty sealing them all so they don’t form acoustical weak spots in the walls. The plumbers are due to come in early next week to re-install the kitchenette and bathroom pipes, and the general contracting crew are putting Kinetics Iso-Clips on the wall and hanging sheetrock. As of this morning the iso booths are mostly closed, but the angles in the control room will be a bit more complicated.

Overseeing this project has gone from being a nearly full-time job to the equivalent of something like having a child. In addition to making sure that work on the studio is coming along smoothly, I’ve been spending time painting the apartment upstairs. Theoretically we could finish the apartment up in a few weeks, but I need to keep the crew focused on the studio if I want to be working in there this October.

API is planning to commission the desk on October 1^st, and I’m doing everything I can to make that a reality.

As always there are plenty of pictures available on our photoblog at http://strangeweatherbrooklyn.blogspot.com.

– Marc Alan Goodman
strangeweathersound [at] gmail dot com
http://strangeweatherbrooklyn.com

Marc Alan Goodman is a producer/engineer who’s worked with artists such as Jolie Holland, Marc Ribot, Shudder to Think, Dub Trio, Normal Love, Alfonso Velez, Angel Deradoorian and Pink Skull.

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