New(ish) Member, New Theater, and some Questions

[Zurls]

Howdy all! Long time lurker - first time poster. For the past 6 years I have been the AD of a small theater in Seattle, and before that have done nearly every tech jobin a small theater. We've been around for 17 years, and a year ago we lost our theater home of 10 years to development. So we packed everything into storage and had an "itinerant season." This past August we secured a new space and got it up and ready for our season's premier show at the start of October, nearly killing everyone in the process. We are now the proud parents of a bouncing baby 75-seat fringe theater!

Currently we are rehearsing our third show in the space (which I am directing and set designing) and for which I am putting in a 10' revolve. This process would not have been possible without consulting the numerous posts here re: turntables/revolves. So I have two questions. The revolve will be operated manually and I wanted to get some recomendations of the best way to do that, as well as for locking it in place. The second question is related to the first: in the 80's I worked at a community theater where at some point I think I had experience with nearly everything in theater (a really fabulous education). Anyway, when we needed to rotate large set pieces or trucks, we made these wooden T's (out of 2x2 I think) with a sort of coathook at the end. You would use it to grab an eyehook at the base of the set piece and pull the piece around. When the marks lined up we'd then kick a wedge of wood under a couple of sides of the unit (and frankly those wedges never really held the thing very well). I was thinking of using the same T tool to pull the revolve (thought not the wedges). Let me just add that, to justify the expense of putting this in we've determined that we are utilizing this for the rest of the season, so I want to make some standardized choices that can be handed from production team to production team.

Any thoughts?

[gafftaper]

Welcome to the Booth Zurls! It's great to have someone else from Sea-town join CB. Send me a personal message and we'll chat about local stuff.

As for your question repost it over in the Scenery forum. This forum is just for saying hello and getting oriented to the community. Many regulars don't read the new member forum. So you'll have a much better response over there.