When Wes Lachot first put pencil to paper to design Manifold Recording, he’d always imagined I’d have an API Vision console in the main control room, and he design the scale of that room accordingly. More than a year after that, and nearly two years ago to this date, and still somewhat undecided on our choice of console, we made an educated guess as to where and how large a trough we should reserve in the control room slab:
We then compared the field measurements with the dimensions of an API Legacy Plus that I was planning to buy:
got the form built and the concrete poured:
and that was that…until a console plot from API showed us how much more space would be required as we increased our channel count from 48 to 64 and our console frame from the Legacy Plus to the Vision:
Transferring certain dimensions down to our floor with blue tape, and being careful to note the location of the north-most path of the radiant pipes (highlighted in green):
The white pipe in the trough is a proxy for the 6″ diameter cable bundle that must pass from the patchbays, via the trough, across to the mixing buckets. You can clearly see that at that deepest part of the original trough, it sticks up well above the finished floor. Basically, we needed to move the trough about 5″ to the South and deepen it a good few inches. Which was a very painful functional decision to make, because aesthetically you can see that our pyramid (defined by the rear corners of the room) converges to a point just at the edge of the existing trough.
Doing our best efforts to “measure twice, cut once”, we made extra-careful measurements and then made arrangements to do very controlled violence to the concrete.
The first order of business was the control of dust. We fully tented the area of the concrete cutting:
Connected an exhaust fan to pull the dust toward a collector (which is not seen, but is about 3′ behind the camera and pulling air/dust like mad):
And on the other side of the tent, an intake fan to balance out the exhaust fan:
After three days of work…Voilà!
Here’s another image showing just how fine the work is…virtually seamless!
And very clean. The dust tent worked!
In other progress, the Music Room sanding operation progressed from 80 grit heavy sanding to 120 grit medium sanding:
And then to buffing. Here the floor is prepared by spraying on a diluted solution of water and isopropyl alcohol. This raises the grain and helps with the buffing process:
In the booths, cabinets are going up in Booth A:
And fabric is going up on the walls:
And on the East side of Booth B:
Assuming we’re on track to open in about 9 weeks, here’s a look back at where we were nine weeks ago, with the Music Room floor just being started:
and the Control Room mostly untrimmed:
Something tells me that we’ve done more in the past nine weeks than we need to do in the next nine weeks. Let’s hope so!