Stuart91

That technique will work for some individual customers and organisations, but not councils or large corporates. What's stopping you chasing an invoice at day 31 anyway?

For anyone from Plasa looking through this thread - it's things like this that provide people with a reason to visit the show. It really needs to be encouraged. There's not massive amounts of changes from year to year in each manufacturer's offering, so it's easy to skip the show if you're not looking to check out something specific. The seminar programme is also a big selling point. I understand that the exhibitors pay the bills, but they're often the least compelling part of the show.

Yes, that's correct. It was a sort of "group brand" because they had other sites dealing with new equipment sales as well. Most likely. I don't remember them building anything themselves. A lot of the equipment I bought from them had come from PRG, but they sourced from all over.

They look like what I need, but are significantly more expensive than the ones Yorkie turned up. Looks like a good option for folks needing just a handful. Good point. 70mm is just the length of the shank - not including any bolt head or wings. The bolts supplied with the deck have an hex-socket head to take an Allen key, and despite being knurled a little are difficult to undo particularly when you are wet, cold, and tired. Those bolts are only threaded on the last 30mm of the shank. Everything else I've found seems to be threaded all the way up, although I don't imagine that's going to be a problem. (The holes in the clamps have plenty wriggle room)

That looks very promising - it's the exact thing that I was looking for. I've used Zoro once before I think - can't remember much about it but whatever we bought turned up as promised and wasn't complete rubbish so hopefully these will be OK. I'll order up 20 (their minimum quantity) and report back.

Thanks, John - I'll drop Westfield an email. Hadn't come across them before. I don't think I have to get them in stainless, the existing ten+ yr old bolts are standard BZP or similar and look fine. Just that if we were to weld up something ourselves, the welds would rust far quicker and it wouldn't take long before they looked unacceptable.

Wing bolt is probably the more correct name but doesn't seem to show up much more. I've also seen "thumb screw" used as well.

Good to know that they are available somewhere. But you're right, that's way out of my budget. The existing bolts are 70mm, I'm tempted to try 60mm and see if we can get away with it, but I suspect there'll be situations where the lack of length is a pain.

Possibly, but we need 100+ of them. We do have capacity to weld but have umpteen other projects needing attention. Plus since the deck is often used outdoors we'd need to paint the welds to avoid rust etc.

I'm looking for some M10 wing-screws (like in the photo below). They're for the clamps on Topdeck staging decks, to replace the standard bolts which lack grip. My challenge is finding anything long enough. We need 70mm of length, with at least 30mm of it threaded. I guess I'm onto specialist suppliers for this, the first couple I've tried haven't come up with anything suitable, does anyone have any leads?

Most of the metal installation racks that I've encountered aren't much better. Very thin steel with just self-tapping screws holding it together. Fine on the deck but I wouldn't want it over anyone's heads. (Especially Bruce's grandchildren) If getting a rack like this in the air was the only option, I'd use Unistrut top and bottom, sandwiching the rack between them with threaded rod. Then the top of the rods is what attaches to the bar. I'd still have concerns about this arrangement, especially in a busy theatre where you have set and lanterns moving around regularly. Site-specific risk assessment required.

Terralec used to sell a range of fixtures that would operate on one DMX channel for simple on/off control. Seemed to be aimed at wedding/function DJs who needed to be able to kill the lightshow during speeches etc. without pulling power. We've got some eLumen8 fixtures in our hire stock that can activate their sound to light mode using a specific channel. There are a couple of shows we provide for every year where the customer doesn't want an operator but needs some "zoomy lights" at certain points. I've left a simple desk (Jester or similar) with *just* the sound-to-light channel patched so that they just have one fader to push to get it happening.

I bought some of the original XSW range, put a dozen on a school show that I was mixing. RF-wise they were fine but the achilles heel was the easily accessible sensitivity switch on the beltpacks. That was enough for me to sell them on to other customers who didn't have wandering fingers. That flaw has been rectified with the new XSW-1 and XSW-2 series. I expect the RF performance will be similar. I didn't fancy the XSW-1 for hire stock, looked a bit "karaoke" for our purposes, but we have ended up with a fair handful of XSW-2, mainly handhelds. They tend to be used singly or in pairs rather than by the dozen, but have been fine on the RF front.

I vaguely remember someone on here mentioning that they used a recording of their father's voice to check speech intelligibility, for similar reasons.

I did wonder if many of the PAT testing companies had a "disposable" structure, where the Ltd. company can be wound up at the first sniff of a claim against them. Of course, it's very hard to prove that a dangerous item didn't deteriorate after the test took place. I'd sometimes wondered about leaving "traps" for testers, like plugs with the fuses removed, so that they should be impossible to test properly without replacement.

Some older Martin gear had a pin 2/3 reverse because Martin had their own multiplex standard prior to DMX becoming standard. It was similar enough to DMX that fixtures could use both but kept their own pinout. I suspect some other manufacturers chose to match this, caused headaches for me more than once. I've also seen som small controllers that have a switch which flips the polarity on the output. Saves a turnaround, but it's another thing for dry hire punters to fiddle with and cause problems.

That's optimistic... I'm sure most don't even do that. I remember Bruce sharing a story here of how one testing firm lost a contract for his university.

Adam's testing regime seems quite sensible. Frustratingly, what I often find is that insurers insist on an annual test so everything gets done regardless. This in turn means that the job goes to whoever is the lowest bidder on the quantity. Which is how we end up with the situation where nothing is *actually* tested and instead someone is paid to slap on a green sticker and accept the liability.

I think what's happening is most hire companies are running down their conventional stock, and not replacing lamps when they go. The lanterns are worth less than the lamps these days. We sold off all of our generic pars (for little more than scrap value) a couple of years back, apart from one that's used as a dummy load for test purposes.

When I've had similar problems to this, it's been because the spacing of the lens from the source is off. Perhaps there's a spacer plate or something that's meant to be in there?

Flown monitors are ideal if you have a way of making that happen. Otherwise, get the speakers as high as you (safely!) can.

Handhelds (and transmitters in general) tend to be harder to come by second-hand compared to receivers as they're far more vulnerable to breakage and theft. It'd be super-janky, but could you short out the power switch contacts, so that the transmitter is live when the batteries are inserted? Far from ideal, but it sounds like they're desperate.

It wouldn't happen to be a mis-coloured connector of the wrong type? Kosher PowerCon connectors are blue for the supply and white for the drain. As well as the different colour, they're keyed differently to avoid misconnection. But meanwhile in the wonderful world of AliBaba etc. it's possible to get either type in whatever colour you fancy. (My personal favourite was some black and yellow coloured ones that would pass for TrueOne at a glance...)

A school near me had a loop system arranged like this. Problems arose when an incoming production put a stack of D&B C7 directly in front of the loop microphones. The loop amp seemed to be kept permanently turned on, and the analogue multicore had been laid directly beside the induction loop cable for most of its run. Instant feedback through the PA, at quite exciting levels.

Another vote for CDD - we've had very good results from them in similar situations.