TomHoward

For Mig, the little disposable bottle bottles Machine Mart style get expensive pretty quickly.

 

CO2 is cheaper but splatters a bit, Argon is smoother, Argosheild or Argon/CO2 mix is a compromise of about 80/20 Argon and is priced in the middle as well.

 

There's Argosheild available in PD (2litre) sized bottles which I managed to fit on the back of the Clarke 135TE welder, which lasted a fair while, but the valve in the Clarke welder was just mechanical in the torch so it leaked gas the whole time if you didn't turn it off between welds.

The Parweld has a 20L bottle on it which is much bigger (about 5ft x 1ft) but works out much cheaper for the gas within it.

I pay a yearly rental on the bottle and a price per refill, there are often offers on (especially car forums etc) for reduced price rental.

 

Also you get get Gasless wire for your MIG, which feeds through in the same way but has the flux in the wire the same as a rod.

I think when using gasless wire you are supposed to turn the polarity of the mig welder around, so the torch is DC -VE and the ground wire is DC +VE, the reason for this is totally beyond me.

I’ve got a mig we use for box section mainly, set pieces and making tank traps etc. I started with an Clarke 135TE from machine mart, but outgrew it and bought a Parweld XTE201c a couple years ago. It’s a big heavy beast to move around. I haven’t tried stick welding so can’t make any comparison unfortunately

Thanks to all.

 

Ray, should I post the image in the thread for the image of posterity? I have it saved but obviously it's to your credit.

 

I have some old Boyer 30W column speakers that have a 2.5W tap that I can pull the transformer out of, or to buy new transformers from CPC with a 1W tap is under a fiver (link)

 

I'll try the 2.5W ones I have with modified resistor values

Thanks for that, does that give approximately line level?

 

Do the resistors have to be anything beefy or just 1/4W resistors?

 

Just had a dig found some speakers tapped at 2.5W but nothing at 1W yet. Will keep looking.

Evening all

 

I have a possible need to get line level out of 100V. It's a one-off job so ideally I don't want to spend too much on it.

I know there are some products available, but they usually run £100+. I'm happy to buy one as a second option.

Is there any easy circuit or transformer to drop from 100V to line level output? I have a box of transformers down to 8ohm off old speakers, don't know if they could be combined with a DI box or similar to provide a low level output?

 

Many thanks for any pointers

When you have a concert on the stage, with the mixing desk you already have, and the speakers you’re going to buy, whose job will it be to set the equipment up, take it down, set up the microphones and mix the levels for the band? Will someone at the school do it or will you be hiring an engineer in for the concerts?

Yes, this is supporting college shows though, and was with full colour costume and set, to be turned into back and white by the lighting.

I have been asked on more than one occasion if we can light an area in black.

Likewise, plus "on cue everything on stage turns to black and white"

I looked at doing ours but didn't in the end, as although it disposed of the need for floppy disks it didn't fix our main issue that the fixture tables hosted by Zero88 for the Frog series desk have outgrown 1.44MB so can't be loaded into the desk without modification on the fixture table editor to get the file size down, so you can't add a new fixture in a rush directly from the website files.

Alan are you interested in our Bullfrog 96? (It's on eBay at the moment)

We used the SmartShow NetDMX as a first ArtNet node for QLab - it didn't work out the box at all, QLab wouldn't find it, (didn't respond to ArtNet poll), didn't respond to broadcast mode, would only work when Artnet node address was entered manually and fired directly at it - which QLab didn't allow so didn't work for us. Seemed to have some deviation from ArtNet spec, but it was a nicely made product and these were firmware issues so hopefully they will be ironed out in future.

Search for cricket rope gives 24mm polyprop white at £165/220m

We have cricket boundary ropes at work that sound very like what you're describing. They are pegged down by hooks / staples hammered in & stretched between them.

For ratchet strapping these things down are marquee pegs & a lump hammer the best option? Or are those screw in anchors worthwhile?

Excellent, they have done us well for Behringer parts in the past so good to know they are good for X32 parts too.

The UPS that the Facebook groups all talk about I believe is a bit more relevant to the 110V operation and their dodgy power grids. Obviously not a totally bad idea but I've never used one on a size of gig you'd use an X32 on.

 

Electronic Music Services in Southend are an authorised Behringer service centre and are much more co-operative in supplying parts than Kiddeminster. We haven't sourced any X32 parts from them but would be worth a phone call.

Handle is right for Pacific but I don't believe the Pacific shutters are removable.

(Or aren't designed as removable, at least)

I think you need to be reasonable, let this one go and just get on with life... the poor horse is well flogged by now! :)

I'll let it go.. It's just the hypocrisy of suggesting that users are hanging onto an outdated medium when you were responsible for introducing it so late..

 

Like selling a 4-star cars in 1999 and then having a go at your clients in 2006 when they are still driving them.

Rather than taking any input and responding to whether hosting individual files is a possibility, you repeatedly suggest that the user installs fixtures tools to do the required editing before deployment. On the support forum when one user says they tour into venues so it isn't convenient, you ask if they take a laptop? There couldn't be a more 'fix it yourself' attitude, rather than fixing the problem at source you're more interested in how users problems can be fixed with more work by the user.

 

Those dates do indicate late use of floppy disk then, which is fine - but you yourself carted out that I'm being unreasonable because Apple stopped using the floppy disk in 1998, when your desk wasn't released until three years after that! Late use of a technology is fine but to criticise your users for it when you created the hardware so late in the day is a bit hypocritical.

 

Also our console is 2006 so all this "10 years out of production console" bashing is misguided as well.

 

I don't think I'm asking for much, just that there be a reasonable response to whether there's a way floppy users (and USB emulator - which doesn't solve the problem here) would be able to load fixtures onto their console without having to install and run fixtures tools which is not an easy option for a lot of users - especially in the environments these desks are deployed in. There are ways of doing this - split the library, or host the fixture files individually rather than in a library. You may already have a folder full of the files so it may not be a major effort to make this available and it doesn't have to be presented nicely - just functional. I think you owe it to these users since you considered to use a 20-year old storage medium at the end of it's production run.

I fully agree about the console upgrade, it's not me I'm worried about, but to supply a fixture library that requires editing prior to deployment is a little cumbersome when it could so easily be resolved.

 

If the fixture library is to be increased is there any merit to the suggestion of hosting the individual fixture files in an online library as well as the compiled table? That way users could download the fixture file, and load that from disk, without requiring user editing to get a profile onto the console.

I don't think it's unreasonable for Zero88 to split their library, considering this thread and their own support forum is full of users asking how they fit the 'stripped down' library (note: not the full version of the library, but a version without the palette data/parameter naming specifically designed to fit onto a floppy disk to support these older consoles) onto a floppy disk as designed.

 

Even if we had the fixtures in advance it would require us to make a custom fixture table as the standard library doesn't fit onto disk - which is a step that shouldn't be required. Hosting the library as individual fixture files rather than a common table as suggested would work as well, but without a windows PC with administrator rights there is no way to update the fixture file on a Frog desk - which is just stupid as it could so easily be the case.

 

This has been asked time and time again and the Zero 88 support answer is "fix it yourself".

 

£16 for the emulator. 10 minutes to fix. No bugs!

That doesn't fix the fact that the fixture library still won't fit on a 1.44MB partition...

 

What were the release dates of the Frog range Jon? It's nice to quote when Floppy Disk was considered obsolete, but doesn't the manufacture of the Frog range fall outside of those dates? So essentially if it was older hardware on release these problems were always going to arise.

We receive touring shows and groups - we only have some scrollers but we don't have access to a library any more, so we'd need library access. The point isn't for me either as in a pinch I could create the fixture tables, it'd be inconvenient but it wouldn't be a show-stopper, but it isn't fair on less technical users (of which there are plenty of this desk) to expect to have to install software and use fixture tools.

 

Every release you just need to break it half onto two disks for the stripped down version. It's all people are asking for and it isn't hard.

We seem to be in a catch 22 where customers complain if we don't have the latest profiles, but people also complain our library is too large?! We hoped our solution would support customers who had bought ANY Zero 88 console with fixture support, no matter of it's age, to continue the Customer Support we're famous for and our end users expect from us.

What solution? The 'stripped down' floppy-disk sized fixture file doesn't fit on disk and there is no longer any download available for any fixture file that does fit on disk. To create two files with Manufacturers A-L and M-Z and hosting them, or simply hosting a version of release 25 (the last version which did fit on disk) would take minutes for you, and I suggested both, but still months later although I had a very lovely reply that you would be looking into it there's no action.

 

I'm not going to set up BootCamp for the sake of one manufacturer that doesn't provide a solution that works - and although we have Windows PCs, because we are an enterprise environment we don't have administrator rights on those PCs - as a lot of people in schools, colleges etc (where these desks are still common) would - so we can't install fixture tools - and shouldn't have to just to get any working fixture library - not just the latest - as older versions aren't hosted any more.

 

I don't fancy swapping out for a USB emulator as it seems a waste of time to me, considering the time you'd take swapping it out and chasing bugs I don't think you'd ever recoup that time or value in the saved floppy disks.

This looks like a mistake as version 25 (the new one is 26) is only 343 KB! You could of course use the fixture tools on a PC to reduce the size, but I would put a note on the Zero 88 forum (http://zero88.com/forum/forum/93-frog-range/) - although they sometimes monitor this forum as well and might pick it up anyway.

Fat lot of good putting anything on the Zero88 forum will do you, I raised that with then in January that the new Fixture library is too big to fit on a floppy disk, and their solution is that you need to use Fixture Tools to edit it and remove the ones you don't need. Great but we run all office Macs - and many people are in colleges/schools where they don't have the freedom to install software on their Windows machines anyway.

 

It would be easier if they just made the last release that fitted on floppy disk (25) available for download, which again I suggested in Jan but still no luck.

 

http://zero88.com/forum/topic/6722-zero-88-fixture-library-release-26/