...On another note, should I attach tie-line to all my long runs of cable? (10-50 feet?)...
Absolutely! Depending on the length of cable, start with a 24"-36" piece of
tieline. For
stagepin cable, using the center of the
tieline, tie a clovehitch followed by two half-hitches around the cable 3-6" from the female end. Put an
overhand knot at the end of each tail to keep them from fraying, unless you're using synthetic
tieline in which case you can singe the ends. The male 2P&G will most likely be plugged into something permanent, the female end will be on a pipe somewhere, so that's where the
tieline goes. For mic Cable, you don't want the
tieline hanging from the mic, so it goes on the Male end.
DMX cable can go at either end, but i generally prefer it on the female end, but the tie should be about 12" from the
connector, so as to allow one to tie the cable and still have enough to
plug into the moving light.
Edison cable tielines can go at either end, but I usually use the female. Any AC cable 50' or longer should have ties at both ends, to better restrain the coil. The TV/film industry uses 3/8"
sash cord and covers the knot with
friction tape, to make it more difficult to remove and keep it in place.
...And what is the proper way to secure excess cable on catwalks?
Coil the excess cable into a 1' loop and tie the loop to something structural, preferably not on the same pipe as fixtures.
You're ME was incorrect. I am no sailor, but I really dig rope work. "The Ashley
Book of Knots", the compendium of rope and rigging, (seriously, a great
book to check out) clearly instructs a right-hand, clockwise coil.
Maybe the ME was not incorrect. Does your
book mention anything about "right-lay" vs. "left-lay"?
Way way way way back when (read as 1960's), when I was doing some theater work, I ran into the same problem with catwalks and cables. I had some time to kill and came up with a solution to cable slack. On the side of our railing there were vertical pipes welded every eight feet or so. I got some 4x4 blank
J-box plates and mounted them to C clamps. I then mounted the C clamps to the rails above each
cove opening and used them as hang points for cable slack. It worked pretty well and you could add or delete them as needed.
Wouldn't side-arms have worked just as well? You already had the C-clamps, so all you would have needed was some 12" pieces of 1/2" ID pipe. I love using sidearms for cable management purposes.
...The only thing I would add is that sometimes you can tie or clamp something up overhead to make it easier to hang those cross over cables. ...
Floor=Bad. Overhead=Good.
...Most Techs I think would rather coil it themselves than have it coiled incorrectly and then have to do it over again anyway.
Unless it's a
one-off and the cable is all going back to the shop. During a
Load-Out, site labor costs way more than shop labor, and most major shops will want to recoil it on their machines anyway, so just coil into the
Cadillac, using all the space available. And don't tie anything (unless the rental cable came with permanent ties); shops hate that. Even though they love to
send out 10'
DMX cables with
e-tape (sometimes
friction tape) on them in four different places, or
multi-cable tied in four different places with jute.
As to coiling/over-undering: I'll restate--do whatever the cable wants. It will tell you, not with its words, but with its actions. Become Zen with your cable. And NEVER take new cable or rope off a spool from the end. Stick a broom handle or something through the center and keep the spool horizontal. If you don't believe me, take a
roll of bathroom tissue and pull the end in
line with the core.
Another question to all: Some MEs I work with force us to run excess cable "down and back" on a
truss, as opposed to neatly coiling it on top, or in the case of black
truss, putting the coil on the inside. I can maybe see the argument if the
truss is going to be walked upon. Electrically, I can't see that it matters. One cannot create an electro-magnet with AC cable using hot and
neutral. Even L6-20 cable has the phases offset by 120°. I wouldn't
build a stack of 120v or 208v
Multi-cable 2' high, due to heat dissipation, but generally we're talking only about 20' extra feet or so. So the question is, A) coil or B) stretch out [and back]?