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Author Topic: NEW SEATS ideas Allan Barnes Expert Film Handler Posts: 108 From: GRAND BEND, ONTARIO, CANADA Registered: Mar 2009 posted 01-06-2018 01:33 AM                        If you have installed any type of new seats in your cinema... please share you recommendations and suggestions. Our existing screen two has a flat floor with 99 red Irwin #90 Citations.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-06-2018 08:33 PM                        Telescopic Seating makes a really good, well-built seat. Next time we replace our seats we'll probably go with them. (The maker of our current seats, Greystone, went out of business or we'd go with them again.) My #1 recommendation would be: Don't cheap out. If there are "bargain" seats out there, there is definitely a reason for the bargain.  |  IP: Logged Buck Wilson Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 894 From: St. Joseph MO, USA Registered: Sep 2010 posted 01-06-2018 09:47 PM                     I hadn't heard that Greystone went out of business. Can't say I'm surprised. Our seats are garbage and it was a constant struggle(i.e. 6 month lead time) getting replacement parts  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 01-07-2018 12:32 AM                        Do you folks really replace your seats often? When I made my theatre 20+ years ago I bought used Irwin seats along with a projector and most of the other equipment that I needed from a theatre that had gone out of business right around that time. (Apparently they had the worlds worst location: They started out as a regular theatre and got no audience. They changed to a porno house and still got no audience. So they went bust and I swooped in and got their equipment.) Over the course of time I upgraded and replaced most of the equipment that I originally purchased, and it's all gone now except for the seats which I'm still using and which are just as good as they ever were. Some are better than they ever were, in fact, since I've had about half of them re-upholstered when they get holes or tears. And I've had to replace the springs that make them fold up in about a quarter of the seats over the course of time, as well. They aren't fancy but they're pretty decent and certainly adequate; I've never considered changing the seats and there's really no reason to. I have no idea how old they are; based on the style I'd guess they might be from the 70's or maybe older than that. The seats are fine, though, and I've never heard anyone complain about them so I guess everyone else agrees with that too. So how often do you guys change your seats and, more interestingly, why?  |  IP: Logged Nathan McLaughlin Film Handler Posts: 12 From: Checotah ,OK /United States Registered: Jun 2017 posted 01-07-2018 10:52 AM                        Hi everyone newbie again we just bought new rockers from Mobiliario seats out of Mexico we replaced ours because our seats were only 19" wide They will be delivered next week we picked rockers because we have a wood floor we thought it would be easier on the floor plus more comfortable Now Mobiliario tells me that I need 1&1/2 inch thick floor I do not have , but the old seats were just screwed down I would like to hear some opinions on solving this problem I am leaning to putting them on 2x6 or 2x8 runners as the only place we have carpet is down the aisle We are reopening a small cinema in a small town so we are new to this business So we are happy for any information on all aspects  |  IP: Logged Martin McCaffery Film God Posts: 2481 From: Montgomery, AL Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-07-2018 10:56 AM                        We're replacing our seats in March with Millennium from Irwin. Our current seats are from 1962. We had them refurbished maybe 15 years ago, but the time has come to replace them. We'll also be redoing the floor. The seats are the #1 thing people complained about here. I don't find them uncomfortable, but plenty of the (very old) audience does. We're a non-profit, so were able to pay for this with fundraising. I don't expect them to last 55years, but they'll be in service longer than a digital projector.  |  IP: Logged Brent Barnhart Film Handler Posts: 12 From: Terre Haute, IN USA Registered: Jan 2018 posted 01-07-2018 11:40 AM                        To Nathan, Sounds about right on the required thickness. With a wood floor and rockers, they will be needed. It’s a shame the supplier didn’t mention this upfront. I would think you can make it work with your plan. Though I’m no expert. You might run that by the supplier and see what they say.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 01-07-2018 12:01 PM                        Since you already have a wood floor, and you have to take the old seats out to replace them, why not just put a layer of 3/4" plywood on top of the existing floor. A couple of coats of paint on that and presto: New floor of the required thickness. My auditorium floor is 3/4" plywood. I repaint it once a year over Christmas using an oil-based floor paint and it works quite well.  |  IP: Logged Nathan McLaughlin Film Handler Posts: 12 From: Checotah ,OK /United States Registered: Jun 2017 posted 01-07-2018 12:54 PM                        Well we discussed that but our theater has the old tongue and groove which we painted and looks pretty good not to mention a pretty good slope when we pulled the seats we found a lot of spilled stuff got trapped under the seat footprint and I was just thinking put runners caulk them good and maybe the spilled stuff wouldn't run under the other seats do you pull the seats to paint ? How bad is the crap under the footprint? I don't think these did but that was the biggest reason we thought runners Thanks for the information  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 01-07-2018 01:36 PM                        Bear in mind that nobody will actually see (or appreciate) the auditorium floor. It's dark in the auditorium and even darker between and under the seats so you can get away with a lot and nobody will ever notice. I don't remove the seats to paint; I just paint around them. It's really not a hard job; the toughest thing is to do all of that crawling around on the floor (which isn't getting any easier as I get older *sigh*) but there's not much to it and it actually goes pretty fast. I close my theatre for only two days a year (Christmas eve and Christmas day) and I actually do the painting on the night of December 23 after doing the clean-up from that show. That gives the floor almost three full days to dry and for the paint smell to go away before the next show on December 26. The main enemy of the paint is (I think) women's high heeled shoes. There are always little chunks that get knocked out of the paint over the course of the year; if it wasn't for that I could probably get away with painting once ever several years instead of every year. I have had a few years where I was playing some big deal movie over Christmas and was forced to play it on Christmas eve and Christmas day so the floor didn't get painted that year. It's still not the end of the world, but it stays a lot nicer when I paint it yearly. As for the "yuck" under the seat mounts, if you keep up on mopping it's not too bad. Since I don't pay myself by the hour I can spend the time that it takes to do a decent cleaning job in the auditorium after the show so things don't get too out of control. And since I switched to bottles from premix I do about 10% of the mopping that I used to, as well. When I initially had this floor made I sealed the gap between each of the plywood sheets with Polyfilla. When re-painting I always make sure paint gets into those gaps, too. I had one year when some of of the top layer along the edge of one of the sheets started to lift, an area maybe two feet long and four inches wide. I think something got under it through that gap. I managed to fix it by mixing some carpenters glue and water so I could dribble it down into the affected area and it would flow to where it was needed, then I sealed the edge and as far under it as I could reach without prying that layer up too far with full-strength glue. After beating the whole thing down with a hammer on a piece of 2x4 I stacked four or five bags of popcorn on the floor to weight it down for a few days and never had that problem again. For the next few years I always gave that area some extra attention when painting, and I've learned my lesson to always be sure to cover the area between all of the plywood sheets with plenty of paint every year.  |  IP: Logged Nathan McLaughlin Film Handler Posts: 12 From: Checotah ,OK /United States Registered: Jun 2017 posted 01-07-2018 02:11 PM                        Frank Thanks for your all your input I don't want to be a pain this a great place for information and and we've learned a lot Thanks again And Brent To be fair our seat company didn't now we had wood floor till I was ordering anchors  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-07-2018 08:36 PM                        We have replaced our seats 3 times since 1980. The first time was to replace the original seats in the theater, some of which were from 1930 and some were from the previous theater, so I have no idea how old they were. They weren't so worn-out as to be unusable, but the rows were way too close together and the seats were too small and just not all that comfortable. We went from 500 seats to 255 with that job. Those seats were "fairly cheap" models from Seating Concepts, but they lasted 22 years. By 2002 they were literally falling apart, so we did a major upgrade to much nicer Seating Concepts seats. At the same time we changed to a continental-style seating arrangement to allow for better sound for the patrons. We saved a bunch of money by buying those seats direct from Seating Concepts, but a few major mistakes were made with that order; the seatbacks were too high for our floor slope/screen height from the floor combination, so shorter people had trouble seeing (this despite a "sightline study" provided by SC that showed we'd have no problems), plus, they made all the seats the same width, so we had no offset. I somehow didn't spot THAT problem until the seats were all installed and the crew was gone. (The perils of working another job.) We got complaints about those seats from Day 1 because people just couldn't see around them, unless they were over about 5'6" tall. We could have lived with the situation probably, but it just made my blood boil on a nightly basis. So two years later we bit the huge bullet and put in the Greystone seats and bought them thru a dealer this time. We solved all the problems of the previous seats, plus we stretched out the legroom a bit more and went to a 194 seat count. They have lasted till today and are still in good shape except the foam in them is shot, and it's proving to be impossible to take the damn seat pans apart to put new foam in so we're not sure what to do about that. So my advice for seating shoppers is: - Get good seats, not cheap ones; you get what you pay for - Be sure you use a company that looks to have stability - Be sure your seats have replaceable parts and can be taken apart - Use a dealer, don't buy direct (unless you are an expert)  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 01-07-2018 11:05 PM                        I have about twenty spare seats that I keep in a pile in the basement. When the upholstery is shot, I just bring up a new one. If the return spring breaks, I bring up a new pan. And when I get down to my last three or four spares of either the upholstered part of the seat or the pan, I take the pile of broken seats to the woman who does the upholstery or the seat pans to the machine shop for new springs. And once I get them back, I re-create my pile in the basement and I'm good for the next four or five years.  |  IP: Logged Louis Bornwasser Film God Posts: 4441 From: prospect ky usa Registered: Mar 2005 posted 01-20-2018 10:42 AM                        Code won't allow wood floors in a cinema that is open to the public in Kentucky and most states.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 01-20-2018 09:53 PM                        One of the many advantages of being "grandfathered in." I love our wood floor, it really enhances our sound.  |  IP: Logged

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