dje

Oddly enough I'm going to take his side on this one. Maybe not on account of 'training' (as if he really felt he wasn't trained he ought to have made the complaint PRIOR to falling) but I should imagine the solicitor has advised him to take this angle since failure to ensure staff competence is a clear breach of HASAWA.

It really is about time we stop taking this daft approach that the ladder is the answer to the question. That everyone can use a ladder. That it is obvious. That it's risk-free if common sense is applied.

It's about time we stop finding it totally acceptable to carry a lighting fixture up one and rig it to a bar all on your own, using the hands which ought to be on the ladder. To do 3 points of contact you need 4 limbs available.

There are times ladders are appropriate, but we need to end the culture of that time being all the time. There are a plethora of bespoke made options to reduce this risk... from clever towers (I bought a 'Solo' access tower for not much more than a Zarges which folds down tiny and goes up 6m) to motorised grids to powered access to tension wire grids... I am pleased to see that the school has opted for some kind of platform as well as pole up fixtures, this is a step in the right direction; it'd just be nice to see theatres doing this BEFORE people got hurt.

Area 4 for the EXEs and Unusual for the Liftkets.

You can buy Liftkets direct in the UK now - John Jones (formerly of PCM / Lift Turn Move etc) is their UK sales rep. (john.jones@liftket.de)

I personally rate the Liftket over the EXE Rise on the sole premise of spares availability worldwide.

Personally I also think GIS / Loadguard motors are worth looking at - for a slightly different reason. They're a bit big and heavy compared to other alternatives, but their 'tropicalised' hoist (wax dipped transformer, galv chain, IP67 enclosure) makes them far better outdoors than any other entertainment hoist.

I have seen Loadguard LG16s left outside for 3 months in a coastal town, externally they came back looking like absolute death and once the chains had been put through a good clean to get the surface rust off, and the bodies washed down with hot soapy water, they looked good as new. Internally they were unaffected.

When I'm working in the Far East I always try and stock up on lead solder because it's not generally for sale here.

As for temperature, whilst I know that it's not technically correct I personally run my soldering iron at maximum temperature all the time, it's easier on my wobbly hands as it liquifies faster. Yes feel free to frown at that but I know I'm not the only one doing it

I really rate Pete Smith too. Yes the office is in Northampton but he has people in London and Sussex so covering SW is fine.

For me (without speaking badly of others) Pete is great for a no-nonsense heads up. You'll get a straightforward answer and without any pressure to use him to supply any fixes.

Some companies seem to use rigging inspections as a sort of first-time site visit to see what works they want to sell the client.

SL on the Downstage. The reason being the hand line.

If you have a hand line on the tabs, pulling the hand line in an anti-clockwise direction means you're pulling the thing on the left hand side.

So if you're stood in the SL wing and you're looking towards the centre of the track, pulling on the left hand side of a hand line pulls the curtain hung on the downstage track towards you, and pushes the curtain hung on the upstage track away from you.

And the opposite from stage right. Therefore an anticlockwise motion opens (as is generally conventional) and clockwise motion closes it.

If you had the SR curtain hung on the downstage track, an anti-clockwise motion on the handline would close the tabs which is counter-intuitive.

I think depending on budget my inclination would either be:

1. Install a patchable system with a mixture of dimmers and hot power (or relay power), in the future if you end up eradicating all incandescent fixtures it's only a case of swapping the modules out.

2. Install all hot (or relay) power and buy some bar-mount dimmer packs with half couplers on. Then in the eventuality of somebody bringing in incandescent lanterns you can just hang the dimmer by the lantern... you treat it like an intelligent light (power and data) so it makes no great odds to your system whether you're using one or the other.

Unlike MEWPs there is no obligation to be formally accredited for access platforms, just that the users and management are competent and follow properly risk assessed procedures. However I will recommend an on-site training session for as many volunteers as can be mustered post-lockdown and that the ladders get locked away.

If it affects your decision at all... can I just put it out there that there is no legal obligation to be formally accredited to use MEWPs. An accreditation (in the IPAF PAL card) exists... but it is not mandated by the HSE.

Realistically, your obligation to ensure that your people are properly trained in using the podium steps is no greater or lesser an obligation than to ensure they are properly trained on the MEWP.

The Health and Safety at Work Act requires the employer to ensure that employees are suitably trained and indeed competent to use any equipment that they may need to use as part of their job.

However it does not require any particular form of accreditation to demonstrate that (nor does it require any formal accreditation or even formalised training. It just requires competence).

From a legal standpoint, there is absolutely nothing wrong with providing your staff with MEWP training which is relevant to the machine they're using and the environment they're using it in. There would be nothing at all wrong with you delivering in-house training on the specific machine and the hazards associated with the machine and the venue, and allowing people to work under that training. You might like to do your own proof of training (ie having all candidates fill out a quiz and do a short practical in front of you on the machine to demonstrate they have understood the lesson content)... I think this is a good idea, but I would say the same for anyone being taught to use the podium steps.

The IPAF card exists in recognition of the fact that a lot of people working with MEWPs are self employed / freelancers / casual employees and therefore work from site-to-site and machine-to-machine so therefore a generic and single 'ticket' to demonstrate proof of training is valuable to site managers ensuring that contractors on their sites are suitably trained for the machine they're using - considering that the contractor and site manager may not be known to you. But for a regular roster of theatre staff, working on the same machine, in the same building every time... the rationale behind the IPAF PAL card is not so relevant.

It always amazes me how many venues pick ladders so as to not spend out on IPAF training and tickets. They're voluntarily putting their staff at greater risk to avoid an expense which isn't necessary anyway!

https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/5/334235/01v96v2_om_en_f0.pdf

here's a user manual ... it's been literally about 15 years since I used an 01V so sorry I can't do much more than that

Out of curiosity, does anyone think there should be more regulation on the sale of such devices?

Simple answer - YES.

More complex answer - yes, but not quite sure how it would be managed....

My inclination is that, to enforce it, the easiest way would be to insist all operators of laser systems are specifically insured.

The insurers would then handle the competency requirement.

Rather than making competency itself the legal requirement.

Out of curiosity, does anyone think there should be more regulation on the sale of such devices?

Whilst I appreciate that British Health & Safety is generally very good because of the 'do what you like, as long as you're competent" philosophy - which places responsibility on people to not do stuff unless they're competent... I also feel that such a philosophy only really works where people realise they're doing something dangerous.

When people are buying these for small nightclubs and house parties, and trying to emulate the effects they've experienced in professional environments, with little understanding of what they're actually doing... it's hard to educate them on Health and Safety because they may not realise they're doing anything which requires competence or qualification.

With technology always comes bigger and more powerful units at lower costs. We will start (if not already) seeing very powerful units being used in amateur environments and maybe the manufacturers and distributors should start taking a little more responsibility for who they sell to?

The LD was Tim Routledge, and he often works with Neg Earth, so it wouldn't surprise me if they supplied the kit.

LD was indeed Tim

Programmer was Tom Young

Gaffer was Keith Duncan

All kit supplied by Neg

The plan is that they'll likely leave the frame permanently in place, but only attach the fabric when they have a showing. (Which would likely be a couple of times a week, so no point in having the fabric out and vulnerable in between)

 

The stage roof fabric makes sense. What sort of size were you using? I'd anticipated eyelets and bungees rather than putting tube through a pocket but that sounds like a good arrangement. Sounds like it might be a bit more time consuming to put up and down repeatedly though.

 

 

Well yes - but to be fair ours looked great once tensioned, we could have strong winds and no movement at all. You will not get that with just bungees around the edge.

In terms of weather protection... rather than re-hanging the screen (and having to do all the tensioning all over again) you could cover it instead.

To be honest ours was left out permanently on the seafront and never got bad enough that a fortnightly window clean wasn't enough. Sure if you got up close you could see the ming that had gathered (birds seemed to take aim at it anyway) but that's why I said in my previous post to use good projectors to overcome the imperfections in the screen.

Yes... I supplied screen material for an outdoor drive in cinema (before COVID... it was a massive fail and nobody went... but that's besides the point).

It actually came from a company who make stage roof covers. We came to the conclusion that safety and structural integrity would come first so it made sense to use the stage roof company. We'd effectively make it a projection screen by tensioning it, using the right RAL white (I think we got the RAL number from the Rosco catalogue or something similar).

We used a scaff structure built by a kind of generic construction scaffold company (although perhaps given the current climate, you could use an events scaffolder at a competitive price?) which was as you allude to held down with ballast, a mix of concrete blocks and water-filled IBC containers (they actually used 60/40 sand water which apparently gives you more like 1600kg in a 1000L IBC).

Screen had pockets on all 4 sides which we put scaff tubes into. Holes were cut in the pockets, scaff tube inserted, then tensioned with lever hoists and the scaff tube clamped to the structure and the hoists removed. We needed to add ladder beams to the structure to clamp the screen pockets into, when we used scaff tube, even thick wall steel tube deflected way too much.But the nice thing about doing it that way was we could remove all the rigging equipment and leave it just on scaff.

Washing was done every few weeks by a window cleaner with a 'reach and wash' system.

What we found is yes there's always an amount of imperfections in the screens, and some dirt that won't budge... the easiest (although more expensive) solution is to basically accept it as inevitable, and overcome it by using big projectors.

I assisted with building 2 radio studios in a disused underground car park, the expert came up with the design for 117dB attenuation for the studios using all lightweight materials and when tested achieved 114dB & 121dB then BT came along and drilled holes through the walls for their cables, it felt just like leaving the door open and was a pig to repair.

Similarly I worked on the build of a new music venue which, at great expense, had the entire 'live room', c/w bar and toilets, built in a 'room within a room' like you get in a recording studio. Seriously heavy duty floating floor, walls built onto the floor and isolated from the exterior walls, internal ceiling sat on the internal walls and again decoupled from the structural roof. In it's initial tests, it performed excellently in noise reduction. I don't remember the figures but it was very impressive.

Then of course we used the venue and it reached about 6000 degrees what with all the insulation. So we chopped a massive hole out of the wall for an air con unit. (It was, albeit, a purpose-designed sound attenuating air con unit. But it was a hole in the seal, all the same). Then of course came the fact that keeping the doors (double doors - ie an outer wall door and inner wall door with air lock between) shut all the time with 1000 people coming and going is basically impossible. And then finally, as you've described, the electrical contractor overran by a factor of 10 (their entire team was unsupervised apprentices... yes illegal) and caught up time by bringing freelancers in who were 'left to it' and drilled holes straight through all the walls and claimed that by filling them with expanding foam they were as good as solving it (yes we had recently qualified electricians with expanding foam in hand, telling career acousticians that they knew nothing and expanding foam was a perfect resolution).

The end result is that we basically needn't have bothered.

I'm having to take it on the chin - I was wrong. I voted to leave.

Since the arts was always going to be one of the major victims, can I ask out of curiosity what attracted you to vote leave?

With regards to the original topic... personally I think it is probably a very badly worded advert. They probably mean they need people with EU passports, and British ones don't count. Simply stipulating they're looking for non-British workers isn't good enough. We may not have automatic work rights there anymore, but neither do a lot of countries.

Maxi Wing will unlock MagicQ to output its max number of universes. It's not a hardware limitation, just software, the wing acts essentially as a key.

I suspect the reason that brochure says 32 is just reflecting the number of universes which were available in MagicQ when the Maxi Wing came out over a decade ago. That brochure looks quite old to me.

I can't guarantee that you'll get what you need here but when I need a small run of electronic components I use eBay.

There's a lot of small sellers there who obviously buy 10 or 100 packs of things from RS and Farnell and then sell them individually.

Yeah I mean going back to the original point I guess if the OP does have time to do maintenance then that is why we should be trying to help recommend a suitable lubricant rather than just recommending that they get somebody else to do it.

Especially when theatres have lots of time and not much money, like now.

 

They do, yes. I didn't say anything about lubrication - I was talking about annual maintenance, as might be carried out during summer 'dark time'.

Yes sorry I did my second post because with the first I'd misinterpreted your point.

I took it to mean that you were suggesting the inspectors would do the maintenance at the same time as inspecting it. Clearly you actually meant that the theatre would just get the inspectors and engineers in at the same time.

I still think, though, that in-house maintenance of the fly system should be encouraged.

Sorry I feel I should quantify last night's point a little better. I was tired.

Legal requirement for inspection of a fly system is 12 monthly. Most theatres will have inspections twice annually due to the abundance of lifting accessories which need 6 monthly inspections (however some theatres carry these out in-house) but the second inspection may not incorporate the fly system. Either way, I would always absolutely encourage theatres to carry out routine maintenance of their fly systems above and beyond the scope of the inspections.

Lubrication of the fly system is absolutely something which I would expect theatres to be able to perform in house. Counterweight systems require a fair amount of lubrication and especially over a large system it's not realistic to think that you're going to be able to spot every dry part within the scope of a 12-monthly periodic inspection; or that some parts which seem to be adequately lubricated when you inspect it, won't be dry a month later (still 11 months before the next inspection!). Even with a service contract, I would not expect lubricating the system to fall within the scope of such a contract. It would be extremely expensive to run a theatre where grease was only applied to the fly system by an engineer from the rigging company!!

It's absolutely right that we exercise caution around lifting machinery and do not attempt to undertake repairs on anything that we're not sure of. However, lubrication is not a repair. It is maintenance - and custodians of lifting equipment are expected to carry out first line maintenance (things like cleaning and lubrication) as part of their duties as the users. Equally hire companies who own chain hoists may well outsource their inspections to a third party, but they would still be expected to keep them well oiled so as to ensure good running and prevent premature wear.

Furthermore, from experience of carrying out a lot of counterweight system inspections myself, I would say that inspectors won't be expected to carry out maintenance for you. Most of the time I will make an advisory note about something which needs lubricating (ie, it doesn't fail it's inspection, but there's an expectation that the custodian of the equipment will follow up on advisory notes)... if we have time on site I may well do it myself as a bit of client care but there's no expectation for that to happen. I will generally expected the flyman (flyperson?) to do it on a maintenance day (presumably exactly like the OP here is referring to).

For general system lubrication you should use a lithium based grease - Castrol LMX is a popular one. Perhaps with Brexit constraints you want to buy British, Brit Lube Premium EP is a good one for lifting gear - https://brit-lube.co.uk/products/premium-ep-grease-range . You should always ensure any grease used on load bearing components is labelled as 'EP' (extreme pressure). Apply it from a rag and remove excess.

Really guys? I know we always do the whole "safety first" / get a competent person etc... But they're just asking what lubricant to use, not for instructions on how to refit the entire system. Is it really an unreasonable request? I respect the need for a proactively restrained approach to rigging advice, but at what point does this forum stop giving advice and just say "speak to your integrator"??

OP - to answer your question... For moving parts of your fly system I would use a lithium based grease such as Castrol LMX. Apply on a rag and remove excess.

Even if you do the maintenance yourself, you're still going to have to have an annual inspection done as part of your insurance requirements. Most venues seem to favour getting a company to do both things at the same time.

They do?

That's news to me. I inspect an awful lot of counterweight systems annually - maybe 100+ - between 2 major suppliers - and we don't lubricate anything.

To be fair, I don't share that concern. I read this to mean that access is tricky, not impossible... such that probably, going up there to focus night after night is a pain in the nether regions. I'm thinking that probably means the FOH bar is hanging over fixed seating, or something like that.

So I can fully appreciate how going up there once a month for maintenance might be preferably to going up there every night (especially when - you all know how it goes - they're soundchecking half an hour before doors and that's the first opportunity you get to focus... and the FOH staff are less than impressed at you setting your ladder up over the seats whilst they're trying to open the house, and asking stupid questions like "is that ladder going to stay there during the show??" with a look on their face that tells you that somehow, they're actually not joking.

I don't doubt that their case for having moving head profiles is perfectly valid. The application makes sense, they would make life easier, of this I have no doubt. It's really just whether their budget and their rigging can support it.

Yes - sorry you are right... it is a good solution, my wording was a little hasty.

I meant good solution to this particular enquiry. I casually assumed that with their low-SWL FOH bar, and the likely budgetary constraints of a 400-seat theatre... might preclude buying a sufficient quantity of moving head profiles to replace 12 Source 4s.

Sure if the budget stretches to it and the rigging could be improved to support the additional weights, then it would indeed be a good solution.

With regards to lower cost... I previously alluded to the availability of the Elation and the Chauvet in my first post... but as I put it then, the costs of those are still £4k and £6k per unit respectively, and having looked up the Martin that seems to be more like £10k... so to put 6 of any of these on your advance bar you'd be looking in the £25-30k region and that's before any costs of beefing up the rigging.

indeed Bryson, my memory of VL1100s is that they were very expensive. But also, very big. And due to the fact that they have a long, heavy 'head'; with a tiny 'base' (bit that doesn't move), basically they exert a fair bit of G on the supporting structure. Fine on a heavy fly bar but in a small theatre liable to cause a bit of a ruckus if their movement speed is not kept under control by the operator.

I'm still voting there's probably no good solution to this... besides doubling the number of lamps on the front truss, and having one set left in a general stage wash focus for the shows where focussing time is too limited. That's how I've always done it.

It almost seems mad now that there was actually a time when you could put a multi-storey home studio equipment store on a high street in Central London and be commercially viable.

 

Very true, Studiospares even moved out to Luton since their location at Staples Corner wasn't paying its way.

 

It wouldn't surprise me, however, if the situation swung back a little, although maybe outside London. There's going to be plenty of call for imaginative uses of empty high street units, they can't all become vape shops or Starbucks. Hopefully the landlords (and rates assessors) will tailor their prices accordingly.

Studiospares is a complex one. It went a bit Maplin didn't it? Seemed to focus more on selling own-brand Chinese imports for home studios.

I am casually curious as to what will happen to shop units as high street retail dies away. Prohibitively high rates seems to be an eternal problem at the moment, hence why it is not uncommon to see entire high streets with nothing but charity shops (as they dodge the high rates).

I'm just not convinced that the market is big enough. Like... do enough people buy audio interfaces, MIDI keyboards and headphones to actually pay the wages and the bills?

It makes a lot more sense to hold one warehouse of stock and sell it online than paying for all those shopfronts and store assistants simultaneously. Especially when, unless you can price match the online-only retailers, people will just come to your storefront to trial the product and then buy it online.

As for big super-units like what was Debenhams etc... I have no idea what they'll become. In Liverpool I'm pretty sure our BHS is still empty. It'd be great to see those places do something rather than nothing... but it might rely on councils being proactive which is not something they're traditionally good at. If the rents and rates go down to attract new tenants into the empty units, they'll have to go down in the occupied units as well. That's the risk.