helipilot
Established Member
I have been working on this project for several months.
We have just moved house and I finally have a dedicated room to build my ultimate home cinema in.
In our previous cinema I used a Harkness Hall 1.3 gain electric screen. The screen performed well but was never completely flat. I decided for the new cinema the only way to go was a fixed screen. I looked at various commercial options but none could provide a fixed screen with masking that I could afford.
I drew up various designs until I came up with this. The base frame is 32mm square steel tubing which was welded together. The hoops were made by hand and individually welded into the frame. My Harkness Hall screen was cut for the screen material (very scary for a screen that originally retailed at £1700 !) Brass eyelets were fitted and the screen tensioned using bungie cord. The picture frame is MDF which is covered with velvet. The horizontal frames had to be spliced as the width is over 100 inches. I could only get MDF up to 8 feet wide so there was no other way.
Fitting the eyelets was time consuming and tedious as I was not sure how well the tensioning system would work. I need not have worried as the final result is perfectly flat with a drum like surface with superb results in pans.
Here are a couple of pictures showing progress. The final phase for the screen will be to make and fit top and bottom masks.
I hope the pictures might give others the inspiration to try their own. The screen currently looks very similar to a commercial screen costing several thousand pounds.
The bare screen showing the tensioning system and the rollers for the masking system
The velvet covered MDF picture frame in place.
We have just moved house and I finally have a dedicated room to build my ultimate home cinema in.
In our previous cinema I used a Harkness Hall 1.3 gain electric screen. The screen performed well but was never completely flat. I decided for the new cinema the only way to go was a fixed screen. I looked at various commercial options but none could provide a fixed screen with masking that I could afford.
I drew up various designs until I came up with this. The base frame is 32mm square steel tubing which was welded together. The hoops were made by hand and individually welded into the frame. My Harkness Hall screen was cut for the screen material (very scary for a screen that originally retailed at £1700 !) Brass eyelets were fitted and the screen tensioned using bungie cord. The picture frame is MDF which is covered with velvet. The horizontal frames had to be spliced as the width is over 100 inches. I could only get MDF up to 8 feet wide so there was no other way.
Fitting the eyelets was time consuming and tedious as I was not sure how well the tensioning system would work. I need not have worried as the final result is perfectly flat with a drum like surface with superb results in pans.
Here are a couple of pictures showing progress. The final phase for the screen will be to make and fit top and bottom masks.
I hope the pictures might give others the inspiration to try their own. The screen currently looks very similar to a commercial screen costing several thousand pounds.
The bare screen showing the tensioning system and the rollers for the masking system
The velvet covered MDF picture frame in place.
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