Safety

The Four Dangers of Sawdust

Sawdust happens. If you are a prop carpenter, or you do any sort of carpentry in your shop, you will produce sawdust. There’s been plenty written about maintaining the dust in your shop; that is, providing adequate ventilation in your shop,  hooking your tools up to dust collectors, hanging dust filters above larger power tools, and wearing dust masks when necessary. That’s all important, but this post is about dealing with the dust that is left. Sawdust creates four hazards:

  • Slip hazard
  • Health hazard
  • Fire hazard
  • Tool damage

Slip hazard

When you have a fine layer of sawdust on the ground, it reduces your traction. It is challenging enough to run a full sheet of plywood through a table saw. Don’t compound the struggle with slipping and sliding around on the floor. On lighter-colored floors, a thin layer of sawdust can be almost invisible and still cause slips and falls.

Health hazard

When you allow dust to hang around, everytime you drop a piece of wood or a prop, you will raise a cloud of dust. A lot of tools, especially routers and sanders, kick out a stream of air which will also blow sawdust into the air, and ultimately, into your lungs.

Fire hazard

Ideally, your shop will be set up for seperate metal and wood areas. In reality, this is not always possible, especially with larger props which cannot be moved to the metal area, or props constructed with both wood and metal. Grinding throws out hot sparks which disappear quickly, but if they find a pile of easily-combustible sawdust, they may begin to smolder and even catch fire. More dangerous is welding around sawdust. I’ve seen plenty of small fires begin from the johnny balls that fly out of a welder and roll into a pile of dust.

Tool Damage

All wood, even kiln dried, contains a minute percentage of moisture. When you turn the wood into dust, it allows the moisture to be released more easily. If you let even a thin layer of sawdust remain on your tools, the moisture will eventually begin to rust the metal parts. It makes no sense to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a tool with a precision-machined metal table only to let sawdust rust it away into a rough surface; especially when it takes about two seconds to brush the sawdust off.

Too much sawdust
Too much sawdust
Reprints

Prop Drawings from the Shakespeare Rare Print Collection

I came across some interesting prop-related illustrations in  a series of books called The Shakespeare Rare Print Collection, which was published back in 1900. The first shows a performance in progress on the stage of the Red Bull Playhouse circa 1672. I’m not really sure this is a Shakespeare play, since the drawing was made during the Restoration Theatre period well after his death.

Red Bull Playhouse
Red Bull Playhouse

You can see some minimal hand props, like a cup and a lantern, as well as plenty of swords and musical instruments. The picture shows a complete lack of furniture though, as well as any sort of scenic element.

The other illustration shows specimens of fans “as referred to in the notes on the Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Specimens of Fans
Specimens of Fans

This drawing was made in 1786. It is fascinating how much variation there is in such a seemingly simple hand prop.

Useful Sites

Friday Links of the Week

The Geeks With Wives podcast interviews K-Tee, a prop maker who has built props for films from Harry Potter and The Dark Knight, to the upcoming Edge of Tomorrow. I follow K-Tee on Twitter, and the props she gets to work on makes me jealous.

Here is another podcast called “The Prop Shop”, dealing with the world of props in cosplay. It has been releasing episodes since last November and looks interesting, though I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet.

Here is an interesting critique of the movie The Help framed as a letter to the props master (the whole website uses this shtick, writing letters to various crew members as a way to review the film).

The Hollywood Reporter has a short obituary for Anne Sidaris-Reeves, who did prop work on films such as The Goonies, Edward Scissorhands and Father of the Bride.

 

How-to

How to Draw a Hexagon

Say you want to draw a hexagon with equal sides. Say you want this hexagon to fit within a circle of a certain size. Go ahead, say it; I’ll wait.

You can do this with just a compass and a straight-edge. First, start off by drawing your circle with your compass. The distance from the pointy end of your compass to the pencil end is the radius of the circle. Don’t change this distance just yet.

Draw your circle
Draw your circle

Pick a spot on your circle where you want one of the hexagon’s corners to be and mark it. Now stick the pointy end of your compass on this mark and draw a line with your compass that crosses the circle. Move your pointy end to this intersection and repeat, all the way around the circle. The picture below will help if this does not make sense.

Mark off the corners
Mark off the corners

Your final mark should overlap with your first mark. You now have six marks evenly spaced around your circle. Connect these marks with your straight-edge, and you have yourself a hexagon.

Connect the dots
Connect the dots

 

 

 

Reprints

Backstage at Booth’s Theatre in 1870

The following illustrations are taken from an 1870 book about the backstage areas of Edwin Booth’s theatre in New York City.

Property Room
Property Room

The book has this to say about the property room and adjoining armory:

The “property room” gathers within its fold a marvellous curiosity-shop; helmets and tiaras, mitres and swords, crowns and masks, gyves and chains; furniture of the past and of to-day, “cheek by jowl;” griffins and globes, biers and beer-cups, coffins and thrones; decorations for the garden, the boudoir, the palace; furniture for the salon or the hovel—a multitude of things, in fact, more numerous than can readily be catalogued. The “armory”, if not a collection of such strange things, is interesting, and looks as if we were wandering through some ancient tower or castle rather than “behind the scenes” at a theatre.

Armory
Armory

Because the illustrations are so charming, I thought I would show a few more.

Scene-Painters' Room
Scene-Painters’ Room

The book also does the great service of giving the names of all the backstage workers at that time:

We must give large credit for all the complete features of this theatre to Mr. J. L. Peake whose inventive talent constructed the machinery; to Mr. Withan, whose skilful pencil gives us pictures of such rare beauty; to Mr. Deuel, whose tase and research provide all those many accessories of furniture and properties, so often necessary to give illusion to the scene; to Mr. Joyce, who reproduces with historical accuracy the costumes of bygone periods; to Mr. Dunn, the carpenter, without whom the play were naught; and to Mr. Kelsey, engineer, whose care and watchfulness contribute to our safety and comfort.

The stage - setting the scenes
The stage – setting the scenes

The property man’s full name is James P. Deuel.

Originally published in Booth’s Theatre. Behind the Scenes. Illustrated, by OB Bunce. Reproduced from Appletons’ Journal. New York: Henry L. Hinton, 1870.

 

 

Making and finding props for theatre, film, and hobbies