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Building a Trade Show Booth on a Budget |
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Part 4: Building the backdrop... The last remaining part of the booth is the backdrop. This component is pretty important for two reasons:
Since the desk doesn't have a back, I figured I'd just bring the banners all the way to the floor and print solid black on the portion behind the desk. This would give the appearance that the desk had a back on it and wouldn't really complicate assembly. In addition, since banners are three feet tall I figured I could hang three of them on end next to each other to fill the back of the booth. Of course the first step is to design the artwork and messaging. I have a great designer that I work with for stuff like this (check out her site: www.asimpletheory.com). She did the art and had everything run off at our local Kinkos, just had to pick it up. Here are the three banners: 
The plan is to create a frame from conduit to mount the three panels into. Conceptually this is pretty simple but I had a tough time finding a combination of stuff that looked good and was easy to assemble at the show. The frame was pretty simple in concept: 10 pieces of conduit connected together into a frame with three openings. However, the first problem I ran into was lack of corners, tees, and crosses for electrical conduit. In the electrical world all this stuff is done in junction boxes so there isn't any need for them. After wandering Home Depot for a while I found that the gas pipe area had all the require connectors. However, they're really big compared to the electrical stuff and didn't look very nice. I finally settled on copper plumbing supplies. The nice thing is that the outer diameter is virtually the same as the inner diameter of electrical conduit. The only problem is that the conduit has a coating that makes it just a bit too tight. However, a bit of work with sand paper and you can get the two to fit together nicely. The only real problem with copper supplies is that there isn't a cross in plumbing. I needed two crosses to attach the center poles of the frame so I had to make these from two paris of tees. This got a bit hairy... First step is to cut the back of the tees. I wanted to have a nice clean cut which pretty much ruled out using a hacksaw by hand. So, in the true spirit of power tools I rigged a jig for my table saw: 
This results in a nice clean reproducable cut: 
The only real down side of this is that the outer edge tends to fly off (remember, safety first kids!). When I finally cleaned the garage after this project was over I found two of the edges: 
Next step is to solder the two halves together with some regular copper tubing to form a cross: 
Clean this up a bit with some steel wool and file and you're ready to go: 
The next challenge is to stretch the banners tight. They come from Kinkos with an eyelet in each corner but these are pretty big banners. I also planned to use bungee cord to stretch the banners over the frame so this would require a lot more eyelets to both keep the banner tight and allow a nice pattern for the bungee cord. As a result I bought out all the medium size eyelets at the local fabric store and went to work. In all I added 56 eyelets to each banner. If you ever try this, wear gloves or find an intern... this part pretty much sucks (although it gets worse). With all the eyelets in place I could finally try stretching the banner in the frame. Keep in mind that the booth is 10 feet wide and the banners are only 3 feet each. The extra space was designed into the frame border. Frankly this was the hardest part of booth building... anticpating all the measurements really early on in the project. For example, the mounting points for the banner frame are compression fittings in the base of the outer desk components which also has to factor in the width of the center unit, etc... Anyways, here is a shot of the first panel: 
Looks pretty good. Of course what you can't really see in this photo is that the bungee cord is attached to the banner with little wire hooks. I originally thought I'd string the bungee cord through the eyelets but this presented a couple of problems:
I finally figured I'd have to go with hooks so it was back to Home Depot to wander around. The best thing I could find was chain. I figured I could cut each link into a little C shaped hook but I couldn't really get the size right. I finally bought a coil of wire and made them by hand. I actually spent a lot of time trying to find a way to make these things quickly. In the end I built a simple jig: Step 1: Put the wire into the hole and wrap around the screw driver. 
Step 2: Clip the wire and finish the wrap. 
Step 3: Pull the screwdriver out and move to the other jig. 
Step 4: Bend the wire around the nail and clip. 
Repeat 156 times... 
I finally measured off the hook placement on the bungee cord and tightened up the loop on each hook so it was anchored onto the bungee cord at the correct place. That meant that while the bungee cord was like a string of xmas lights (ie. always tangled in a box) it made for fast setup since you just needed to clip the hook into the eyelet. Here is a shot of all three panels assembled: 
You might notice that there isn't any bungee cord around the center poles. Things just got too cluttered looking and the pattern was too hard to assemble so I went with wire clips. 
The nice thing about the wire clips is that they ensure uniform spacing. In addition to the simple clips, there were four 'spaced' clips per pole that kept everything exactly centered. In the picture below you can see the clip actually loops the the pole. 
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