Here's another addition for the 'rock concert' portion of the 2008 show. There will be two of these laser units. These will be controlled by dmx and will do liquid sky patterns and some other effects.
They came in today and I couldn't resist playing with them a bit.
Here are some shots with the lights on in the garage and just a little bit of fog. These show just how bright these babies are!
Now, a shot with the lights off.
And finally, one shooting outdoors. You can make out the hood of the truck. The laser is on top of a ladder shooting out the garage door at about six feet high. The white spot you see is a street light down the block.
My first project for this year is my nativity set. This is my first plywood cutout project. So, after all the cutting out, priming, painting and attaching to stakes, I finally finished attaching the rope light to all of the figures around the middle of February.
I am going for a very simple design with black figures outlined in rope light. They will be turned on when Linus tells the Christmas Story.
Here they are in the light
Here's one of the palm trees. They are approximately 8 feet tall.
When I saw Steve Bang's version of the Bellagio fountain in lights I thought it was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
So... I'm doing my own version for this year's display. I am scaling it down to 10 feet tall and combining the left and right sides to save controller channels this year, anyway. That still leaves 24 10' uprights to wrap and 8 3/4" leaping lights. I had four leaping lights last season, so I only have to do 4 additional of those.
Three weeks ago, I finally got started with the uprights. I made myself a powered wrapping rig to try to speed the process along a hair.
A $10 can opener from Big Lots provides the drive. (That motor would be way, way too many rpm... it was just the first thing I found to use as a spindle for the other end) It was easy to weld a bolt to the little gear that normally turns the can, then I drilled a hole in a quart paint can lid and used nuts and fender washers to attach it. Then a pvc bushing was screwed to that, then a flex fitting to hold the pvc piece being wrapped.
I run the stp1 and put the plugs on so it's wrapped underneath the lights. Here's one ready to begin wrapping the lights on.
As of tonight, I have 16 of the 24 2" uprights finished and ready for storage, just another 8 to go.. I think I could make one of these blindfolded by now.
This won't be used all the time, only during the 'rock concert' portion of my show.
I think I am going to use TSO's Christmas Jam and do one sequence only using my dmx fixtures (four moving heads, four LED par 64's, two dmx abyss fixtures, my laser and some fog from two dmx foggers. Those fixtures will be used very sparingly, if at all in the other sequences, best of both worlds I figure.
I will have to figure out a way to mount it up there, but tougher things have been tackled. I am going to have a wireframe star around it that I will use most of the time... or maybe a star with this mounted above... not sure yet.
