On the last weekend of June I exhibited my Beta-Base at Comic-Stein 2019. The Comic-Stein takes place every year at the ComicCon Stuttgart and is therefore also quite a big exhibition. As far as I was concerned I was a bit nervous whether I would fit in with my quite simple self-buildings at all.
The arrival takes place on Friday, I packed my big crates into the car and made my way towards Messe Stuttgart around 11.00 a.m.. Interestingly enough, I was stopped and questioned by German customs, but after I explained what it was all about, it was no problem. Arrived at the fair, one could drive with the car into the hall, if one did not have to drag at all large crates, this was super comfortable. I was accommodated in sector 4, where I found two huge rows of tables, one already filled with 100 StarWar-like spaceships. Otherwise I was told, free choice of seats and so I placed myself at the corner of the table.
The construction went slowly like this, I had to cut the size to see how much space I need on the table, so that the neighbours know how far you can build. After I had defined the wide times according to the plan, Gin started with the construction. And here was immediately improvement potential for the SteinCHenwelt. I had packed the different models arbitrarily into the boxes, which was now revenge. There were the models, which I needed at the beginning below, which came rather to the end above and so on. That made the introduction difficult, because you had to search for a long time, repack models, etc. But slowly I got going and started to set up the system.
Soon it turned out that the tables were a bit too short and I was missing a row … What now? Fortunately the table layout was flexible and the neighbours (greetings to BrickingBavaria) offered to slide over a bit and so the missing row was replaced by another “column”.
When that was also solved, the construction progressed smoothly and after about 5 hours everything was ready:
The next morning it started as usual, there were short speeches from the organizer (thanks to Schwabenstein 2×4 and Florian), the division into the guards and then it started already.
Here you can find a video on PatSonsBrick, how he walks through the hall before the start of the exhibition and introduces the individual exhibits (at 11.40 you can see the beta station):
There wasn’t really much to do during the fair, during the guard duty you had to take care that the visitors didn’t touch anything or pull down the towels, etc. Otherwise you could visit the Comecon and talk to the visitors etc.
The dismantling went then quite fast, but also here something learned again: Write down the crates and/or plastic bags, then one knows immediately, what belongs where and does not lose much time to look for the suitable bag, to sort etc.
All in all, the Comic-Stein was a funny exhibition, it was fun and it shows that my own buildings are often confused with the actual ClassicSpace. And here some more pictures:
