OOC # 37
It was a day of mixed results...*grin*
I may have mentioned it before...I've been so tired for the past couple of weeks I don't remember for sure who I have or have not told about it...but we have a cable-controlled puppet that's one of the props for our evening show (the show is Alice in Wonderland themed...the puppet is the caterpillar, smoking his hookah...we didn't have room for the hookah on stage, so the 'hose' just runs into the giant mushroom he sits on...) It's like a mid-80s to early-90s vintage piece, judging by the style...the only thing I know about its history is that the guy who made it has passed away, so there's no one to ask for details about how it was made, and that it's been sitting in storage for several years. The director bought it, had someone drive from Southern Idaho to Reno, Nevada to pick it up and drop it off in Farmington, Utah...
It looks cool, but it's showing its age (if you look close up, it's even more apparent). The director had a professional puppeteer fly out to give it a once-over and train some of our crew people on how to run it, and she had some questions about it that she passed on to some of her contacts, and, well...we're now replacing all the cables that operate it...
Funny thing, though...NONE of us (including the director) have ever had to do that with this type of puppet...so we literally have nobody we can use for easy reference on best practices for refurbishing...
So, naturally, it's become my project, along with one other guy (I mentioned him to you, Don...Macyn...another jack-of-all-trades type of guy, without quite the range of experiences I've got, so when in doubt, it defaults to me...but he's a sharp guy and between the two of us, we can figure out most things...) Today was Round One...and I'd have to call it a split decision. We learned where most of the controls are, we learned that we can split the foam in unobstrusive locations and Barge contact cement will glue it back together pretty nicely, we learned that we should really invest in a bunch of new set-screws because the ones we've got are JUST worn enough that the correct-size hex key will spin in them, one side at a time, before they get fully tightened down, and we learned a pretty simple method for pulling cable housing through the puppet and to the control board. We also, unfortunately, learned that we were given the wrong size cable to string through the housing...the existing stuff is 1/16", the stuff we were given is either 3/32" or 1/8", I'm not sure which, but it doesn't fit inside the cable housing....
So, after cutting one cable (which I would have cut much closer to the end, had I known in advance what we were facing), and pulling the old cable housing out/using it to pull the new cable housing, and pulling the old cable out of the old housing, we realized that our only option was to feed the old cable through the new housing and reconnect stuff, because they still had shows tonight that the puppet had to be operational for. Jumped on Google, found some cable the right size on Amazon (I wish it was all available on one spool, but I had to order three sections of it to make sure we had enough), got the puppet put back together, and we'll attack it next week, with a clearer knowledge of what we have to cut and where we can cut it, and having a better understanding of how to string the cable inside the housing, as well.
But after psyching myself up to be in 'puppet surgery' all day, it was kind of unsatsifying to have to put it all back together after only a couple of hours and having only succeeded it replacing half of what we needed for just one of the eight cables, but I understand a lot better how the rest of it will need to be done. So...a draw...