Caltech

Waterworld

(All right, it's been 4 days since OPI, but let's pretend I posted this a week ago.)

So the water system in Atlantis OPI has been giving us quite a few headaches recently.  The basic idea is that we have 3 levels: one just below the dance floor level (around 3 inches off the ground), one at 16 inches off the ground, and one at 7.5 feet around the edges of the elevated platforms.  Water flows off the sides of the temple into the troughs around the platforms, where they waterfall off the sides into the 16 inch level.  This extends around about half of the party, and every 4 feet or so the water there goes into the ground level through notches that we cut.

Here you can see the 16 inch level surrounding the temple, and the ground level below it.

It's kind of hard to see, but there are two waterfalls off the temple here:

What's powering the whole system?  Well, underneath the 4 foot raised platform we've got an 8x4 foot reservoir with 3 pumps, which takes in water from the ground level and pumps it back up to the temple.  It's really cool when everything's running; the three pumps are humming and shaking, the water is rushing through the pipes, and there's water dripping everywhere.  I like to call it the engine room.  Let's take a tour!

Here's Chris painstakingly monitoring the pumps and reservoir:
 

And the three pumps:

When you're dealing with water, it turns out that (surprise surprise) water dripping is one of the worst things you'll encounter.  Unfortunately, we have a ton of leaks.  Everywhere there's water, we put down plastic sheeting.  Thick plastic is expensive, so we have to settle for paper-thin .7 mil sheets.  It tends to tear when it touches just about anything, so we spend a lot of time patching up all the leaks.  You can see a lot of Gorilla tape holding our party together on the 16 inch level:

 

To get the water running sustainably, we need to fill up the bottom two levels most of the way.  That takes a few hours, especially with the leaks -- we made a rough estimate that we lose about 5 gallons a minute!  As long as that is less than the flow rate of a hose, though, we're safe.  We measured the hose to be about 10 gallons a minute.  Either way, it still takes forever to fill up the system, and we need to keep the hose running throughout the party for the water to stay at an acceptable level.

Anyway, that's the water system.  I'll hopefully get a post up soon about how the party actually went (hint: it was awesome)!

Temple City(scape)

OPI is in 5 days!  Everything's been coming together in the last week; we finished up putting the plywood on the temple using the scaffolding, and now the tip (which you can barely see in the picture) goes 28 feet up in the air:

We also got up the wallboards on the bottom of the temple, which water will flow over. 

And most of the cityscape and mountain background is in.  The cityscape is cut out of drywall or OSB, about 5 feet high, and placed 3 feet from the dance floor.  Another foot behind that, we have a full wallboard of mountainscape.  It's actually really cool -- in one corner, we have a sunset and the sky fading from yellow and orange to dark blue on the other side of the party.  Here you can see us touching up some of the cityscape, and one board still has to go on.

 

The courtyard is a lot messier than it looks; we've got tons of tools and spare plywood and drywall lying around on the dance floor. It also started raining earlier today, which is not really great for drywall (it tends to disintegrate), so we had to cover a lot of the cityscapes with plastic.  Here's an overall view:

 

We've also finally started on the water system, which is probably going to take up most of our time for the next few days.  In my next post I'll detail exactly how it works, and exactly how much it leaks!  Exciting.

March to the Scaffolding

This last week, we've worked mainly on the temple.  It's basically a giant facade going 28 feet high, attached to several raised platforms at 8 feet and a staircase going down onto the dance floor.  Creating the backing for the facade is a challenge in itself, because you need to backbrace it so it doesn't fall over backwards when people push on it, and also make sure it weighs enough so it doesn't fall over forwards if it catches the wind!  We used a few 16 foot 2x4s nailed together as the main beams going straight up, and then attached a lot of shorter 2x4s to brace them so they don't move so much.  If you look in my second post, you'll see a picture of just the main bracing, which only goes up to 16 feet.

So it turns out that attaching wallboards to a facade 28 feet in the air is, well, kind of difficult to do if you don't have really tall ladders.  We don't have really tall ladders.  So instead, we used ASCIT scaffolding!  It's awesome and sturdy, and would probably go up a lot higher than we need it.  Here's the scaffolding completely attached, along with the backbracing and Steve (who's something over 6 feet) for reference. 

The top level of the scaffolding, where we've occasionally eaten lunch, is something like 22 feet high.

 

Making the bracing is a lot of fun, requires a lot of people, and is probably a little dangerous.

Anyway, we've had the facade up since last weekend.  We've also had another small project: making the entrance.  It's going to be a kind of tunnel, with a (much) smaller facade on the front, that opens up onto the dance floor.  We built the skeleton for that too:

In other news, we finally put in orders for T-shirts, so I'll get pictures of those when they come in.  We're also starting on the water system, which involves getting pumps, building reservoirs, and cutting gutters.  That's probably going to occupy most of our time during the last week and a half, so stay tuned to see everyone get soaked (no really, it's happened already!).

Art Primer

If we only had construction, every party we build would look pretty pitiful.  It's the art that goes on the skeleton that really makes OPI stand out.

We generally paint our artwork on drywall, which is a 4x8' board made of gypsum plaster.  It's cheap, but has the unfortunate tendency to chip easily and disintegrate when wet (which has not been great considering how much it's rained in the last few weeks).  We'll also use OSB and plywood, but generally art works best on. 

The plan for art this year is to have a view of Atlantis from all around.  Most years we just have one layer of art around the dance floor, but this year we're going to double it!  So the edge of the dance floor is kind of complicated: the platform ends, and then for two feet we have water a few inches above the ground, followed a trough of water at 16 inches -- the water will flow over from the upper to the lower level.  That 16 inch level goes on for another foot until it hits the first wallboard that we've painted.  This is the cityscape, which we're making a kind of 3D shadowbox out of. 

The top of the wallboard (bottom in the picture) is cut to outline all the buildings in the city.  That will be at around 5 or 6 feet.  Here's a finished portion of the cityscape:

So that's going to go all around the dance floor.  A foot behind that, we'll have wallboards of mountains all around.  Maybe it sounds a little strange, but watch the Disney movie!  It'll all make sense.  Anyway, art has been working long hours priming wallboards, tracing designs, cutting them out, and painting them.

 

In addition to the cityscape and mountains going all around, we've got to paint wallboards for the temple and entrance.  You can see one board that's going on the temple above; we've pretty much finished all of the temple stuff by now (but I won't show you that now because it'll be a lot more impressive once it's out in the courtyard!).

We've gotten a lot more construction up in the last week, so I'll get to that next.  OPI is in two weeks, so everyone should come out!

Solving the Flatness Problem

It's been raining.  I guess our party theme is Atlantis, and there's going to be a ton of water all around, but we'd kind of like all the water to come after we've built everything.  In the meantime, we've lost 3 out of 4 good building days out of the last couple weekends.  Luckily it was nice and sunny today, and we got in a solid weekend of work!

Our first task when designing a party is to figure out where the dance floor is -- after all, that's where the party actually happens!  Then, you can plan all sorts of construction around it.  Of course, you need to take the shape of the courtyard into account when doing all of this.  For reference, here's what our courtyard looks like with nothing in it:

You probably can't tell from the picture, but the Ruddock courtyard has the fantastic property of being curved.  That's great for drainage, since all of the water will go towards the center and disappear pretty quickly, but it doesn't make a great dance floor.  So we have to correct this by placing wooden dance floor platforms everywhere people will be walking, and level them out so that we aren't walking on an incline.

These dance floor platforms are the heart of the party.  Each is an 8' x 4' rectangle built out of 5.5 2x4s (this is standard lumber for construction; it's a plank that's 1.5" by 3.5" on the edge and comes in different lengths.  We tend to buy 8 foot 2x4s and cut them down to whatever size we need).  We can attach these platforms to each other by drilling holes in the sides and attaching carriage bolts.  This way, we can make a grid of platforms that spans most of the courtyard.  Afterwards, we cover them with OSB (oriented strand board, similar to plywood), paint it, and the dance floor is done! 

Well, that's not the whole story.  We need to first determine the highest point of the courtyard that the dance floor will cover, place a platform there, and level it.  This means we have a few people around the platform to hold it in place and level, with 3 corners in the air, while someone cuts a short piece of wood and nails it into each corner.  Once there are "legs" in all the corners, we cut "feet" to go under the platform itself and support the weight.  This way, the platform is both level and stable, and won't move around when you jump on it.  Starting at our reference high point in once corner, we attach platforms to the previous ones by bolting them in and making sure they're level and flush; other than the first one, no part of the dance floor actually touches the ground.  The custom-cut feet support everything.  This process is long and tedious, because we have to go from one corner of the courtyard to the other, cutting wood and hammering it in, over and over again.  But once it's done, we have a level plane across the whole courtyard, which you see here!

 

On Saturday we finished up the dance floor, which meant it was time for the interesting construction to start.  Over the last several weeks, we've put up a few elevated platforms to make the temple.  They're built similarly to normal platforms, but use larger pieces of wood and are supported by thicker beams.  We've got one at 4 feet, surrounded by two staircases ending up on the dance floor, and that's connected by an 8 foot wide staircase to two more platforms at 8 feet.  Today we finished attaching all the stairs and platforms to each other, so we have the flooring for the entire party complete!  Now it's time to make things look good...

Here's a view of everything we've got up so far. 

Next post: Construction is only half of OPI.  See how much work Art has to put in!

 

Two months of work for five hours of fun

OPI this year is on Saturday, March 7th, at 9:00 pm in the Ruddock Courtyard.  Mark your calendars.

I've talked to friends who go to all sorts of different colleges, and they tell me about the parties they have every weekend.  They all sound basically the same -- a crowd of people gathering in a dorm or apartment and dancing -- and there's no way I'd be able to tell the schools apart just based on the kind of parties they went to.  Then I try to describe what we do here at Tech, and if they're not dumbfounded, they're at least confused.  "You guys build parties?"

It's kind of hard to describe a Caltech party.  You see, we don't just turn on the music, get out the refreshments, and wait for people to come.  We decide on a theme and essentially build a "set" to resemble the theme.  This usually involves hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars of wood, paint, and other construction materials.  It's weird, it's wacky, and it's incredibly time-consuming.  But in the end, all those hours of work you put in are worth it when you see the entire house come together to pull up a 16' tall facade and finish the party (hopefully on time), just in time for the rest of the school to come and enjoy themselves for the night.

I'm Kirit, a sophomore physics major in Ruddock House.  Actually, for the winter term, I'm majoring in party construction, because this year I'm one of two people in charge of our Interhouse party.  Basically, every house throws one big Interhouse party throughout the year, in addition to other smaller ones like Frosh Party, etc.  But Interhouse is what counts!  In Ruddock, we call our party OPI -- it stands for Our Private Interhouse, although it's certainly open to anyone who wants to come.  OPI is a big deal for us.  We take a lot of pride in the quality of our construction and art, and we try to stay as organized and on top of things as possible.  For the next four weeks, this blog is going to chronicle OPI construction, right up until the day of the party, so you can see just what goes into making a Caltech party so awesome.

Planning for OPI actually started way back in December, when we had a house meeting to decide on the theme.  In the past, we've occasionally had themes that ended in -o so the name of the party fit with OPI (i.e. PharaOPI, TokyOPI, etc.), so usually those suggestions are tossed out first.  Some fun but unsuccessful suggestions included UFOPI, Don't Taze me BrOPI, and Remember the AlamOPI.  However, once we got the bad puns out of our systems, we narrowed it down to Atlantis OPI, Willy Wonka/Candyland OPI, and San FranciscOPI.  Finally, Josh (a junior MechE) and I volunteered to be in charge of the party, and we started to make plans -- the first of which was deciding on a theme and date.  We chose Atlantis, since it would be a big change from what we did last year, and it lent itself best to a coherent party design. 

So how are we going to make the Ruddock courtyard look like the Lost Civilization of Atlantis?  For one thing, there's going to be water.  A lot of it.  It'll surround most of the dance floor, and we'll have a couple of large waterfalls around the dining hall doors.  The "big construction" project this year is going to be a huge Atlantean temple in the corner, with raised platforms surrounded by waterfalls and a 24-foot tall facade.  Surrounding the dance floor we'll have wallboards with tons of artwork -- mountains in the background with a cityscape in front.  We're going to try to "shadowbox" the design so we get a kind of 3D effect.  Basically, think of the Disney movie and you'll get a picture of how we'd like the party to feel.

We started construction in the second week of January, and we've been working continually since then.  A lot of people want to know why we start that early, especially if the party is in March.  Well, we know from experience how many things can go wrong and how long it takes to put together really top-notch construction.  Having a big safety net means that even if we lose a weekend or two to rain, we're still going to finish on time.

In my next post, I'll start to describe all of the construction (maybe even some of the gory details).  I haven't uploaded any pictures of what we've gotten so far, so here's one of last year's party (Gothic Cathedral).  OPI is going to be awesome!