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Building a Trade Show Booth on a Budget |
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Part 1: Building the podiums... The reality is that everything for the booth was going to have to come from a hardware store like Home Depot. That meant that the design would be dictated by the available materials. I spent a few evenings just wandering the isles at Home Depot trying to envision what stuff I could convert into booth parts. The electrical isle was a real winner. Lots of cheap material with an abundance of fittings offered a lot of possibilities. In addition, conduit would be easy to assemble and would compact well for transport. Other stuff that stood out was the selection of formica which is also pretty cheap and easy to work with. While conduit would be great for constructing most of a podium, it doesn't hide stuff very well. Each podium would have to have an associated computer, cabling, and other stuff that would be better off hidden. I figured the top of each podium could be hollow which would allow us to insert laptops, hubs, etc... I wanted to avoid using boxy construction so I decided on a racetrack shape for the podiums. First step was to make some patterns that I could use with my router to cut parts from plywood. 
Here's a shot cutting out a plywood part using the template. 
To attach the conduit to the plywood I used compression fittings (lots and lots of compression fittings). These are really cheap but hard to screw into a bare hole and keep them aligned correctly. To get around this I found a tap that was just the right size. In the shot below you can see the process of tapping the holes. 
To help balance the look and provide a way to run cables up into the top, I used 2in diameter conduit on one side of the podium. The shot below shows the first pass of a mock up: 
For the container part of the podium I figured 4in of clearance would be enough to stuff in a laptop and hub. Of course this would make the top a fairly big unit so this would also need to come apart. To do this I used MDF as spacers: 
In addition, I need to run power into the unit so I could plug stuff in which required an electrical box to terminate everything. I suppose I could have used an extension cord but this integrated power cleanly into the unit. I cutout one of the spacers to mount the electrical box to: 
My plan was to enclose the unit using a strip of black formica. However, since things needed to come apart, the strip would have to be mounted to MDF blocks that could be removed. The shot below shows the side where the formica strip seam will be. The bolts line up with threaded inserts in the top so everything bolts together tight and solid. 
As things started to come together I realized that a laptop in such a confined space (along with a hub or some other gear) for a full day might overheat. This of course mandated some form of cooling. I picked up a few 120vac fans with good airflow which I could mount in the bottom of the unit. However, not knowing how loud the'd be, I figured I'd also add a switch so I could turn them on and off as needed. This means take everything apart and do a cutout in the base for the electrical box: 
As for the fans, I figured I could use the existing mounting corners but I would have to take off the corners from one side of the fan to drop it into a slot in the base. The shot below shows a simple little jig for trimming the corners off the fans: 
Back to the router to cut out the fan slots in the base: 
Next, cut a groove for the electrical: 
Here is a shot with the fan, switch, and electrical supply installed. Notice that the spacer with the electrical feeder connects to the switch using an extension cord outlet so that the spacer unit can be completely removed for transport. 
In the mean time, the bases seemed pretty much done so I went ahead and put on the formica: 
After looking at things a bit more I decided that the single ring of pipes wasn't really that interesting looking and that something else should be added. The result was a second ring of compression fittings: 
The idea was that I could suspend stuff from the inner ring or even add a full set of supports. Here is a shot with stubs attached to the inner ring: 
Frankly, things looked too busy. In addition, if I suspended a surfance from the inner ring, it would be pretty hard to get to or even see because of the outer ring of pipes as shown below: 
Still, I liked the idea of having more display space and a break in the long lines of the support pipes. The answer was to use a pipe bender to blend the inner and outer rings together: 
Attention then turned back to the base of the podium. In reality it would have to be thicker so I could route out an area for cables. I finally added a second layer of plywood with grooves routed out each end for cabling: 
I then finished off the base with an edge of formica (by the way, formica is a dust magnet): 
The top surface and suspended surface are made from oak veneer plywood. This means the top looks great but the edges look like plywood. This is solved using oak veneer tape. You iron it on and trim it off: 
At this point the podiums are pretty much done other than staining and sealing the oak surfaces: 
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