Ancient falling apart century board.

[gabe]

Hi, at my HS we currently have an ancient two scene century board, complete with 6:1 patchboard, and only about 15/30 dimmers we have work. They're building us a new theatre but it wont be ready for a year and we'd like to keep using this space. So getting funding from the district for new distro/dimmers/board isn't going to happen.
Would it be possible to have an electrician wire our circuts into something like a CD-80 pack? We have an auxillary lepricon board with two dimmer packs, but we can't hang anymore because they're power is run off the non dim of our board.

[Footer]

Yes it is. Basicly they will have to rip out your old dimmers. Is your space 1/1 circuit dimmer, or is it a slide patch or a telephone patch? If it is hard wired it will be a bit more work but can happen, and the other two are a bit easier to retrofit. However, you might be better off getting an electrican to give you a company switch onstage and cableing everything to hold you over untill you get the new space. You might even get the district to buy you a 24 pack of dimmers that can easily be wheeled in to any space, and also buy you cable to hook it all up. I would try to stay away from investing too much money in your old space, but if you keep things loose you will have equiptment that you will be able to easily move to the new space.

[gabe]

Thanks for the reply, but we are planning on keeping our current space even when our new one is done. What we have now is a small blackbox as apposed to a nice big proscenium that we're getting, two very different atmospheres both nice. We have what i believe is a telephone patch, little plugs that fit into sockets, they've told us that to replace our dimmer rack they would need to rip out a wall, Is this the same thing your talking about or is it not as jurastic?

[avkid]

Originally Posted by gabe

they've told us that to replace our dimmer rack they would need to rip out a wall

Did they Sheetrock the original in or something?

[Footer]

Originally Posted by gabe

Thanks for the reply, but we are planning on keeping our current space even when our new one is done. What we have now is a small blackbox as apposed to a nice big proscenium that we're getting, two very different atmospheres both nice. We have what i believe is a telephone patch, little plugs that fit into sockets, they've told us that to replace our dimmer rack they would need to rip out a wall, Is this the same thing your talking about or is it not as jurastic?

Send a picture of the patch. Also, how many curcuits do you have? If you have a patch that can be patched into then the solution is rather simple, as long as you can get enough power into the new dimmers. I still have a feeling that getting mobile dimmers would be the best option that way you still have the option of taking them to the big theatre when not in use.

[fosstech]

What they did when they replaced the dimming in my old high school's theater was rip out the dimmers and patch board (slider patch), and mount the new dimmer rack on the wall where the slider patch used to be (the patch wall was opposite the dimmers). They then just put a big junction box on the wall where the old dimmers were, ran four new cables in the conduit in the floor where the dimmer load wires used to be, and spliced them to the existing 3 phase feed in the box. The new dimmer rack was bolted to the floor over the big conduit. All the little 3/4" conduits coming down the wall (loads to the stage) were fed into a long junction box, and then into one 4" conduit into the top of the new rack.

Pretty simple installation really, but I couldn't say it would be possible in your situation without seeing it. I don't know why they would have to rip out a wall, since usually new dimmer racks are smaller than the old ones....unless they have to rip the wall out to get the old one out....but that's where a big metal saw comes in handy :D