Curves Ahead

Elevator work finished, I was back at the new tour bus drive-through at Harrah’s Sports Book. The project consisted of our building a plaster ceiling that did not touch any of the walls and consisted of a series of up and down arches for the length of the ceiling. (300’) Imagine a section through the waves on the ocean. Arch up. Arch down. And as it progressed through the building it was supposed to lose about 3’ in height. A sloping arched and wavy ceiling.

The first problem we ran into was the fact that we had to suspend this heavy ceiling from wires that would be shot into the hardened concrete, not embedded in the poured concrete; the preferred method. This ceiling was directly beneath the parking garage and the contractor for that project was not the same as the one we were working for. And he wasn’t going to allow us to embed any wires.

The second problem was the fact that the parking garage was built as a post-tensioned slab. These slabs are quite strong, but they vibrate easily because of the tension built into them. Traffic going up and down the ramps of the garage was going to cause our ceiling to vibrate as well. And since this ceiling was all cement plaster, it was tremendously heavy. Wires could be vibrated right out of the concrete. Once one wire failed, the rest would go quickly. I had nightmare visions of the ceiling crashing down onto half a dozen tour buses.

We decided to double the amount of wires as a safeguard. We had no engineering to tell us whether or not that would work, it just seemed to make sense. So, while one crew spent days shooting eye pins into the concrete and tying the wires to them, I had another crew bending the ¾’ ‘black iron into the radius shape we would use for the arches. Miles and miles of curved iron. And all bent with a roller that slowly formed the arch as you rolled the iron back and forth in its jaws. I worked with both crews, wherever I was needed.

Boring. Weeks went by as we tied hundreds of wires to the pins and formed a ton of steel into curved shapes.

Then we had to build 3 scaffolds that would be used for us, the framers and lathers, and then used by the plasterers and finally the painters. The drive-through was about 40’ wide, so we tied 4 scaffolds together for the first low section of the arch. Then a taller set of 4 scaffolds were tied together for the top of the arch, followed by another 4 low ones. And all 12 were tied into one huge scaffold. Moving it took the combined efforts of about a dozen men.