The Shop - Kid Tested, Adam Approved

This is the NYU Film & TV Repair Shop and it's probably been my biggest project ever.   It's a never ending task to keep it efficient, organized and stocked and I love it. I'm lucky to have access to a great shop in the middle of NYC and would be a sad, sad man if I didn't.  As the one and only Repair Tech at NYU Film & TV I am responsible for keeping over 50 film cameras, 300 digital cameras, audio gear and a ton of light and grip equipment up and running.

A Red Letter Day - Adam Savage visits the shop.

 And yes, Adam Savage stopped by.  I won his Inventern competition and helped to finish his Hellboy Mecha-Hand.

I try to keep the essentials on my bench including a lot of specialized camera tools.  The toys are equally important.

The wall of parts is specific light, grip and tripod pieces all organized down to the part number for easy reference with the exploded diagrams.

With a constantly revolving crew of student employees, it's vitally important that everything is labeled clearly so they can find what's needed.   More importantly, it makes sure they put it back where it belongs (in theory).  When a tool gets misfiled it's as good as lost.

The focus chart system I designed and built.

'The Dirty Shop' with all the heavy machinery.  I managed to get a simple mill a few years ago and I would really like a lathe but I'm out of room.  The gray table in the foreground is the custom foam cutting table I made for foaming out cases.

The big red guy is our sandblaster which we use for stripping down lights.  Film & video equipment may be expensive but it lasts forever and we have lights that have been around for decades and work great but are a little ugly. We'll strip them down and repaint them in the booth I installed at the other end of the room.

I recently did a major overhaul on our triage area.  The goal was to make sure every piece of broken equipment has a specific place to go.  This not only helps our student employees but it allows me to quickly assess what needs to get done.

Check out some of the projects I've done at the shop in the Camera & Production post.