Gloves! Protect your hands!

[delnor]

My sophomore year in high school I watched as some people flew in a line that was out of weight, not riding the break properly and what ended up happening was a runaway. The guy that was doing most of the holding held onto the line as it dragged him almost 15 feet in the air. He wasn’t wearing gloves and ended up burning his hands so badly that he had bandages on them the rest of the run of the show. He hands are now permanently scared from that. Gloves are a must when handling any stage equipment, especially fly lines. If you want to get some cool ones that come highly recommended by ILC (Intelligent Lighting Creations one of the biggest dealers of automated lights in the country) check out www.setwear.com they are a little pricy but for heat resistant gloves that will stand up to anything that’s where to go.

[tm1000]

Reminds me of a time when we had a line unbalanced for moving something and after school an actor came into the building for rehearsal. Another actor said, "Hey could you move that curtain" and the actor (thinking he knew everything) walked over to the line and said "yeah" I think it's this one. Well when he released the line, he went up about 5 feet before some techs ran over to stop the line. The moral is, "don't let people who don't know fly touch the fly system"

[dvsDave]

The real lesson to be learned here is to make sure that you properly balance your fly system in the first place so that nothing can get away from you... and those are darn cool gloves too!!

[delnor]

Yep, keeping a balanced fly system is extremely important for everyone’s safety. The most important rule of a fly system when loading or removing weight is to “Keep the weight on the ground”. This MUST be carefully thought out each and every time you change the load of your system. If the weight is on the ground it has nowhere to go if you lose control of the system. Keeping the weight on the ground can be accomplished if you take the time to unload your arbors. I would highly recommend that to change weights you use an electric winch, hook up the winch and take any slack out of the line, remove weights from the arbor if you are taking weight off the batten and then flying the line out using the winch. That way when the line is down the weight is to, and it cant go anywhere well you are working. To add weight to a batten there is no reason to remove weights from the arbor, but still use an electric winch. Trying to muscle lines to the ground almost guarantees a runaway. If you can’t afford a winch then you need to have a catwalk so you can remove and add weight without having to struggle with pulling the arbors down. Anyway, think about the weight and how far it has to travel should you lose control. The farther it falls the more damage it will cause.

[TechDirector]

I know! Our flies are pretty well balanced though. But for our show, we are going to have this huge backdrop that weighs somthing like 300 pounds.......we have plenty of weights to counter balence it though. Why are those ropes so friggin' rough though? Is it because they are always going through the gears and all?

[delnor]

That depends on the types of rope you have on your fly system. There are lots of different kinds of rope and kinds of strands, materials, colors etc. If its rough it could be a hemp type rope (brown in color) hemp is extreamly strong and very durrable but can be a little ridged. I love hemp ropes, but when they get old if you are not wearing gloves and moving flys around you will get little splinters in your hands. If the ropes in your fly system are starting to fray or crack they should be replaced with new ones. You might want to concider a cotton polyfiber rope, they have different types of inner cores but the nice thing about a softer rope is that if for some reason you must move a fly line without gloves you wont get splinters.

[netforce2003]

Another time that you should wear gloves is removing a broken lamp from a lighting fixture. We had some fixtures that werent being used so we tested the bulbs and one wasnt working. Interestingly enough at one time it had gotten so extremely hot that there was a bulge in the glass. Well I was trying to remove the lamp (which was broken at the base) with some pliers and shattered it. I'm glad I had gloves on or I probably would of gotten cut.l

[ship]

I like Stage Set X rope best, but Sapsis Rigging has some other good varieties on rope.
"a bulge in the glass." Bulges in the glass usually isn't from the lamp operating at any higher temperature than normal. Given the voltage stays within normal limits, which would only blow the filament. Such bulges in a lamp are usually caused by Finger Fu#%ing the lamp. In other words the oils from your skin on quartz glass won't allow it to cool down properly and uniformly. That causes a bulge or other things to happen such as changes in color to the globe (like it becoming silver, white or purple) of the lamp and usually also the filament being moved away from or towards the bubble. It can also happen if the atmosphere is dirty and especially if a lot of fog is used around the equipment in making the bulb retain heat in that area. There are some other rare causes for this along with other things such as a filament that stretches out and actually can sag to the point that it burns it's way thru the glass if used horizontally. But that's really rare unless it looses a support.

Clean inspection gloves, lint free towettes and denatured alcohol are good things to have around and use when doing lamp things to prevent the lamps from going bad. Not the gloves that you are focusing instruments with either - the type doctors wear.

Just a few thoughts on a long subject.

[wolf825]

Originally Posted by ship

I like Stage Set X rope best, but Sapsis Rigging has some other good varieties on rope.
"a bulge in the glass." Bulges in the glass usually isn't from the lamp operating at any higher temperature than normal. Given the voltage stays within normal limits, which would only blow the filament. Such bulges in a lamp are usually caused by Finger Fu#%ing the lamp. In other words the oils from your skin on quartz glass won't allow it to cool down properly and uniformly. That causes a bulge or other things to happen such as changes in color to the globe (like it becoming silver, white or purple) of the lamp and usually also the filament being moved away from or towards the bubble. It can also happen if the atmosphere is dirty and especially if a lot of fog is used around the equipment in making the bulb retain heat in that area. There are some other rare causes for this along with other things such as a filament that stretches out and actually can sag to the point that it burns it's way thru the glass if used horizontally. But that's really rare unless it looses a support.

Clean inspection gloves, lint free towettes and denatured alcohol are good things to have around and use when doing lamp things to prevent the lamps from going bad. Not the gloves that you are focusing instruments with either - the type doctors wear.

Just a few thoughts on a long subject.

The boys at ZFX flying Illusions have a cool set of gloves for rope work. Worth checking out IMO... www.zfxflying.com

So Ship, do you save some of the better and more colorfully blown lamps in a small collection? I have a small collection I use to explain what can happen etc etc--like cyc lamps where you can see where some dofus used 4 fingers to put the lamp in (they're great "shakers" too ), and some natural failers where the lamp bulbed out on one side into those pretty grey colors, or the filament actually protrudes out the side of the blown lamp.. I dunno...I find some of those failures to be like "art"... =)

-wolf

[dvsDave]

Originally Posted by wolf

So Ship, do you save some of the better and more colorfully blown lamps in a small collection? I have a small collection I use to explain what can happen etc etc--like cyc lamps where you can see where some dofus used 4 fingers to put the lamp in (they're great "shakers" too ), and some natural failers where the lamp bulbed out on one side into those pretty grey colors, or the filament actually protrudes out the side of the blown lamp.. I dunno...I find some of those failures to be like "art"... =)

You have any pictures of them? They would be a cool little gallery on the photo albums on ControlBooth.com.