Saturday, May 5, 2012

Analysis... Debrief...

Call it what you will. I've now completed two shows with the APA box layout in the period of three weeks and I think its reasonable to sit back and reflect on the idea and its future. Impartial reports on the layout at the two shows can be found here for St. Cloud and here for Alexandria. I never had any real doubts that the layout would work. More concern that it would able to withstand repeated showings without any problems. I even pushed things to the limit by rebuilding one of the fiddle yards in the two weeks between the shows. The layout worked. Two shows in a row. So the concept is a win on that point.
However, I was looking for a scheme where the inadequacies of my woodworking skills would be glossed over by using a prefabricated structure. Not so much of a win on that point. I still had to make conventional fiddle yard baseboards which were subject to my lack of skills and the construction of the APA boxes exacerbated the issue. I will cover that in greater detail later. At the moment I'll just say that the fiddle yard baseboards were very dodgy and joining them to the APA box left much to be desired but they did function. Doubtlessly a better woodworker would make a better job of making the baseboard but then again a better woodworker wouldn't need to take the shortcut of using an APA box to make a baseboard.
Still, I am sufficiently interested in the scheme to carry it to the next stage and add a second section of layout to test the modular capabilities of the concept. Hopefully I will be able to make a better job of the next fiddle yard I construct.

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