a moveable wall

we made a rolling wall recently.  never made one before, 

and it turned out to be a really cool object. 

 

 a local gallery, helmholz fine art, in manchester center, vt. had an opening recently in their new location, a wonderful, open space with dramatic high ceilings and lots of light.  similar to my own house, open spaces have, by definition, few walls, so one can run out of places to hang art pretty quickly.

enter the rolling wall.  inspired by a conversation the owner, lisa, had with ramsay gourd, a local architect, she described to me a 'T' shape with wheels that could be moved as shows and artwork change. 

seemed simple at first.  all we had to do was build it in the shop and move it into the gallery 10 miles away.  we started with the short end above, two pieces of ultralight mdf with two pieces of ultra light 1/2" sheetrock .. at 4' x 7', it turned out to be anything but 'ultralight', and we realized a wall 8' x 7' 

would be pretty hard to move out of the shop and into the gallery.

 

so, most of the ultralight was cut away on the cnc before the sheetrock was applied, which 

helped a bit, but it still wasn't all that ultralight when we were finished.

add some trim, some joint compound and paint, and it turned out to be still a pretty substantial object.  we buried some solid wood in one end of the big wall and used four 6" timberlocks to connect the two pieces which allowed them to be disassembled for moving.  trevor made some little pine plugs to cover the connectors on the cnc and we were all set.  the move went pretty smoothly once we figured out that we couldn't attach the wheels til we got the thing together.  below are the cad drawings ...

happy ending.  about 150 square feet of additional, flexible and moveable wall space and

room for many additional paintings on display ...  stop in if you're in manchester.  it's next to ben and jerry's, brooks brothers and vineyard vines on route 30.  it's a great space filled with great art, and a little of our fine furniture is on display there too ... fine art and ben and jerry's; you can't go wrong there.