If you scroll way the hell down to the beginning of this blog you will see TofuJoe's excellent idea for the new booth. Now while I do plan to one day implement this, it will have to wait until I get my hands on a rolling mill to produce the rings needed. In the mean time I had been trying to work out how to make the top open like an umbrella. Ease of set-up/strike is very important to our booth designs.
Then one day I read a Humu Kon Tiki blog about a Tiki Central post by Sabu The Coconut Boy regarding the 1962 Hawaiian Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair. (gotta love the cyclical world we live in)
I don't know what it is about that roof but it has haunted me since seeing this picture.So here is the idea. Find an umbrella to mod to imply this roof line. Well I couldn't find an umbrella with 12 spines (what we determined to be the minimum needed) so the next thought was to take two umbrellas with 6 spines and meld them together. One trip to Big Lots later and I was the proud owner of two mod-able umbrellas.
First Joe and I broke them down and worked out how to do the mods. Luckily the construction was quite simple. Plastic housings and tie wire. So Joe cut 6 more grooves into the cap.
You can see one of the handmade cutouts in the center of the photo.We assembled both of the lower sliders onto one pole to allow us a bit of adjustment if needed.
To create the up/down of the original roof we needed to move the pivot of the upper set of spines. We simply drilled out the rivets and moved the hole back on the spines.
Finally here is a shot of the frame open 
and one closed.
As you can see we would need to make a few more cuts to allow the frame to close more but it works as it is.So there you go, all caught up now.
