Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Fred's (hopefully) excellent HT adventure

So it does. Try licking your screen. What do you taste?

The last piece of the hardware is in place. Picked up 2 1.5" schedule 40 white pvc fittings, a short section of pipe and a 1.5" floor flange. Perfect.

I need to get some white paint for the flange now so it blends in a little.

I've got tomorrow off, so I can move on to masking the wall and painting.

I've already gotten my money's worth out of my laser level. I spent the last 1.5 hours tweaking until I've got both sides parallel and the top and bottom within 2 mm.

Now I have to undo all that because I messed up. I thought I had the projector close enough to square, but now the image is lower than It was before and I messed up by not checking the lense shift, which was adjusted all the way up. I need to hack 4" off the tube.

I may also put a larger section of pipe around the support column to make it look like one tube instead of a pipe with two connectors.

I talked to the guys in the paint section of the hardware while I was there tonight and they suggested what I was thinking to make sanding easier. Just do a light coat with some drywall mud first and then all I need is a light sanding. That's way less work than trying to sand down years of rough paint.

That doesn't sound right. You double checked, your PJ is mounted upside down, did you try the opposite control?

There's only one control. Turn one way and its up, the other, down.

So the extension has been trimmed, painted and put back up and the projector is all squared up.

I now understand why people love lens shift. Every time I had to move the whole rig horizontally on the track, I had to tweak everything again.

Next up is the screen wall.

What kind of paint did you find? Sorry if I missed it.

It is be a Sherwin Williams grey Apparently its a very neutral grey.

Right now I'm sanding away with some 100 grit paper. Man, this wall is rough. Even with the 100 grit, I'm still going to do a light fill with mud to fill in the craters. Did I call it dimpling? Silly me.

Edit: Screen grey is the name of the tint. I'll probably go with the pro classic paint.

More progress. I've mudded the wall and done a rough sanding. The mud has done a good job of filling in the roughness. I'm glad I got the low dust mud. The room would be a mess otherwise.

The next step is to do a final sanding with a finer grit and tape for painting.

I got my paint and related supplies today as well. The salesperson knew exactly what paint I wanted as soon as I mentioned it was for a projector screen.

A while back I read a post by a guy who does painted walls for projection exclusively, his level of perfection came through in his posts. A point he made was that if its not perfect you'll see it and to make sure you tough it out, wait until it is, before sitting back to enjoy the show.

Are you going to mask the screen?

I've already watched several movies on the raw wall and enjoyed them so I'm not worried about perfection. If I was, I would go buy a sprayer now rather than try a rolled screen first.

Definately plan to mask. I'll use 3" wide trim covered in velvet of some sort.

I want to get the screen painted and do some test drives again before tackling the masking. The first step will be the basic 16:9 mask. From there I'll explore something I can add on for 2.39:1.