Show Time - Part 1

We are planning to show Cliddesden at the Farham MRC expo. in October. In preparation we needed a stand for the layout and after much deliberation decided to adapt a traditional market stall. Reason being that it would be the quickest solution and probably not much more expensive than fabricating a structure ourselves.

We found this market stall, which has some good attributes:

• It is the same length and width as our 6' x 3' layout
• It is designed to be portable
• It has an overhead frame that can be used for the layout nameboard and lighting rig
• Multi-purpose - when not supporting the layout it can be used as either a work bench or market stall

The standard stall has a table height of 30 inches, which is too low for an exhibition layout so the supplier kindly added extra fixings so we could set the table height to 38 inches.

It came as a kit of poles without instructions but to be honest it was obvious how to put it together and it was up within a few minutes. The layout was temorarily placed so we could plan how to dress the stand.

It is a sturdy piece of kit but without A frames built into it does tend to wobble a bit.  We could live with this at home but at exhibition if someone leant against it or worse fell against it then the movement would be most disconcerting and might result in damage to the layout.

There are a number of tasks involved to prepare the stand:

1. Fit a table top
2. Add A frame strapping
3. Make a lighting rig
4. Make a nameboard
5. Make a pelmet
6. Make a skirt
7. Make a backscene
8. Fit an LCD panel for a slide show

To Part 2.

David