ABC: Stumptown
The Ask
ABC in collaboration with BillUps & Outfront wanted to put a 1991 Ford Mustang on a bus stop shelter in WeHO LA to advertise their new show StumpTown.
The Catch: Load Restrictions
The station in question was a prototype by JCDecaux. There was only one of them in the world at the time and it had never been activated in this way, nor was it built to be activated in this way. The whole station is made of aluminum, which has a lot of benefits but load bearing is not one of them. We had to create a 1/4 scale vehicle + structural support and it all had to come in below 300 lbs. After a good amount of deliberation from out production team we ended up creating a full 1991 Ford Mustang with functioning headlights from High Density foam (89lbs) and a steel structural support (200lbs).
The day the project came to me I was asked to come to the site and see if I could find a way to address to the problem. The initial concerns dealt with damaging the property, understandably so. Upon going to the site I had the management team disassemble the roof for me (there were no engineering drawings available). Lo and behold, beneath the substrate of the roof, there were the structural I-beams. Once I found those the rest was easy. I designed a 3 point mounting system (the 4th point was a drainage area that I didn't want to disrupt). My team then created a custom flange that would allow us to secure any mounting structure we wanted and from there we began.
