OOC # 39
Well, today was an exercise in frustration...
One of the illusions we're using this year was a recent purchase, and when the director bought it, he paid someone to refurbish it. It looks great...but it has some mechanical issues. One of them is a little latch on the inside...it's supposed to hold two doors closed. When we got the illusion, the latch was positioned in such a way that NEITHER door could close, much less be held shut by it. One of the first tasks I got when we kicked into high gear on show prep was repositioning that latch...
When the director called the guy who did the refurb, and asked why he got something that so obviously did NOT work, the refurb guy basically said, "Hey, I just made it look pretty, I didn't fix anything..." So, I moved the latch...but overcompensated, and while it wouldn't stop the doors from closing, it wouldn't hold them. So, we moved it again, to where we thought it needed to be...and it kept interfering with one of the doors.
So, today, they asked me to replace it with a barrel-bolt latch. Simple mechanism, should have been a very brief, simple job...emphasis on "should have been..."
I spent all afternoon and a good chunk of the evening working on that damn thing. Got the bolt section mounted on one door, went to attach the receiver to the other door, and found out the gap between the doors was big enough that the bolt wouldn't fully engage. Thought I could get away with building a backing plate that would extend into the gap and let me mount the receiver right next to the bolt. Spent WAY too much time on fabricating that, got it done, but the whole latch assembly in place (I put pop rivets through the holes to hold it in place until I knew...otherwise, I would have wasted even MORE time). Found out that, with nothing solid to hold onto, the barrel bolt latch was useless...you hold the doors closed, slide the bolt, let go of the doors, and they both swing open together and the bolt slides right out of the receiver....
So, I had to reconfigure and reposition AGAIN the original latch mechanism. I wasn't working on it non-stop...but I feel like I spent five or six hours on what should have been a ten-minute fix, and the final solution was just a position and minor hardware adjustment of what it started out with. Beating my head against the proverbial wall...