Ep 25 Wall Spreader

I'm Dave Donaldson. Welcome back to Grip Tips. Today we talk about the wall spreader. This is a tool that I think is often forgotten about. It's called a wall spreader. If you have an interior wide shot and you need to rig lights overhead, this is a really great solution. A wall spreader comes in many different sizes. 2x4, 2x6, 4x4. The 2x4 model is probably the most common and I'll leave a link in the description below to the one that I own. The first step is measuring how far apart the two walls I'm trying to mount to are. Taking a measuring tape, I will measure wall to wall. This room, for example, is 11 feet and 8 inches. So I will go to Home Depot and I will buy a 12 foot 2x4 that we need to cut into. But before we cut into the lumber, we have to do a little bit of prep on the wall spreader itself. First, we will take two pancake apple boxes and screw the plates of the spreader to the boxes. When you are done screwing the base plates into the pancakes, grab the threaded rod side and move the nut away from the plated side. I generally like to give myself about two inches of space between the nut and the base plate. You don't necessarily have to do this step, but we're just giving ourselves some room to work. Now measure the span between the lumber and the plate. Whatever measurement you come out to, add two and a half inches. The reason that we do that is because pancake apple boxes are one inch thick, plus the base plate of the spreader, which is a quarter inch. So we have one and a quarter inch plus one and a quarter inch together, making two and a half inches. So now we're going to add those two numbers to the span of our spread. As we found earlier, the spread is seven inches and then we also have the two and a half inches. So together we have nine and a half inches. So now here's a little bit of math that you have to do. Our two by four is 12 feet long, but our room is only 11 feet, eight inches. So if we take 12 feet minus 11 feet, eight inches, that gives us four inches. So the four inches that we have now have to be added to the nine and a half inches that we have earlier, which gives us 13 and a half inches. And that's what needs to be cut off of our two by four. With our two by four, we will measure one side up to 13 and a half inches. Then I will take a T square and work across the two by four, where I want to make my cut. After that, I will make my cut and we're on to the next step. Now that our two by four is prepped, we can mount the wall spreader hardware to the lumber. This wall spreader comes with little tiny holes for mounting screws, and really it's just to keep the wall spreader from sliding off of the lumber. One more step that we need to take is to wrap our pancake apple boxes in duvetyne. This will help make sure that we don't scratch the walls when we are installing. There's no real science to wrapping the apple boxes, but the idea here is to just make sure that the side touching the walls is completely covered. You don't really have to gaff tape the duvetyne on. I just did it because I know that it will make installing it much, much easier. Last but not least, you need to find the studs inside of the wall. You can do this a couple of different ways, but the easiest method that I found is to use a stud finder. Once you have found two studs that are parallel to each other on opposite sides of the room, you can now mount the wall spreader to the wall. If you don't mount this where there are studs inside of the wall, you run the risk of blowing through the drywall. Now we go into mounting the actual wall spreader to the walls. Don't try to do this yourself. It's easily a two-man job. When mounting the wall spreader, make sure the orientation of the board has the two-inch side facing up toward the ceiling and down toward the ground. If you mount the board horizontally, the two-by-four could bow and possibly snap when mounting lights. So short side up and down, fat faces facing out. When placing pancakes on the wall, make sure to set them horizontally. The reason for this is that the studs in the wall will not always be perfectly aligned with the other wall. By setting the pancakes horizontally, we are now distributing the pressure equally and more than likely we are hitting a stud on both sides. Then just start twisting the nut in the direction of the two-by-four. We are now spreading the wall slowly. When you are tightening the wall spreader, you may need a wrench in order to get the nut to spin as you will be tightening the spreader a little more than hand tight. The wrench I'm using here isn't big enough so I'm using the back side of it to loop around the nut handle and now I have leverage working with me to fully tighten the wall spreader. I will twist the nut until I feel the spreader is secured and a test that I like to do is have one person just barely hold on to one side and on the other side I will try to shake the wall spreader free. The other person is basically spotting the beam in case the spreader slides off the wall for any reason that way the beam doesn't come crashing down. Once your wall spreader is mounted, you can now mount your lights, rigging, cameras, you can do overhead shots, wide shots, maybe you have a steadicam or movi shot that goes all the way in through the location and you just need all of your lights tucked up and away. So a very lengthy episode today I know but still a very useful tool. There's actually different versions of this such as the Panther wall spreader and another one is called a tube stretcher which uses nothing but speed rail but we'll go over those in a later episode. That is all that I have for you guys today if you have any questions please let me know in the comment section below. Also you can follow me on my twitter right here and I have one week left until I give away a mafer clamp so if you don't know what I'm talking about and you want to be involved refer back to the duvetyne episode to find out how to get involved there. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and we'll see you every week right here on Grip Tips. Wade. Wade.