Building a backyard movie screen

Most of the backyard home-built movie screens I’ve seen are overbuilt wooden structures that take up a huge amount of room to store when not in use or are flimsy PVC tubing affairs. My answer is to use steel tubing. It is strong, relatively inexpensive, and easy to set up and store. Here is how to build a fast, cheap and solid movie backdrop using 10 foot sections of electrical “black pipe” conduit for the frame. They come in 10 foot sections ready made and are available at Lowes and Home Depot. The advantages of black pipe is it can be setup in 6 minutes. Disassembly is also 6 minutes. It takes almost no room to store. The key is to use half inch black pipe conduit, which is actually about 1 inch across with 1/2″ internal size. Here are the parts. You need at least, 8 bungee cords, 12 feet of steel cable, two half inch black pipe elbows and two half inch black pipe connectors. Three 10 foot black pipes. One for the top, two for the sides. 4 ring hanger assemblies so you can add eyebolts and nylon cord if you need to stabilize the sides. I found the screen pre-cut to 6.75 x 9 feet which works out perfectly for the 10 foot black pipe sections. It cost me $29.95 from carlofet.com. I had pocket sleeves put in on the top and bottom, the top sleeve for the top 10 foot long pipe and the bottom sleeve for a steel cable stretched between the two vertical pipes. Tabs were sewn into the side hems so that they could be pulled tight against the side pipes with small bungee cords. To …