Temporary Sauna-Bench Style Theater Equipment "Rack"

[@yvonneanthony7295]

How did you get the 2" conduit past/around/thru the 2*6 header plate at the top of the wall? My understanding is that my building inspector could fail framing inspection if the diameter is wide than 25% of the width of the board, so wondering if I need to put up a 2*4 wall next to the 2*6 and compromise the 2*4.

[@granworks]

Keep in mind that building codes differ wildly by location and your local AHJ may not follow the same standards as anything else you find online. Plus, I am not a building professional and so literally everything I say is just my experience building in my local area. So with that... all of my conduit goes exclusively through non-bearing interior walls. They have double 2x4 plates, which gives me enough lee-way with that 60% rule to fit my 2" conduit. And that's just in the equipment closet. In my theater, the conduit goes directly through the ceiling inside of the soffit -- it doesn't go through any 2-by top plate at all. In fact, if the 2" conduit couldn't fit through the top plate of my equipment closet wall, then I would just jog it out to go through the ceiling rather than substantially decrease the size of the conduit, going forward. I do have some smaller conduit that I installed earlier and I somewhat regret it, since smaller conduit is so much harder to work with. In your case, since you are talking about a 2x6 plate, then you must be referring to an exterior wall or at least a load bearing one. Those get tricky. You might not be able to go through an exterior wall's top plate at all. In general, though, if you double up the 2x6 top plate, then you can typically go to 40% of the width and that will give you ample clearance to insert a centered 2" conduit. ALL THAT SAID, I know that some theater builders just use 1" pipe and then use more of them to cover all the wires since the building codes tend to focus more on the effect the hole size has on the width of the wall far more than the length.