Recent content by Bob Musser

Wow, memories! Or nightmares. We lived with that set-up until they modernized our main stage in 2007. I had to find a fabricator who could duplicate the plastic slider handles, as the material on the originals became brittle over time. One "wing" would break off, then having all the stress...

It the words of George Wallace, "I'll seal s**t with an adhesive and adhere s**t with a sealant. I don't give a s**t anymore."

Congratulations! Doing the same in August, after "just" 36 years.

We have a Milwaukee M12 stapler that shoots T50 staples. Pretty good, but the T50 staples only go up to 9/16", so not quite long enough for 1/4" luaun without glue, IMO. We're running Senco for pneumatic staplers (7/16 crown light wire for flats/upholstery, 1/2" framing staples), since there was...

That was my first thought, but the wedges only engaged with the P&D upright at the bottom, so it still wobbled (can't get at the joint to wedge it once the upright is in place, obvs.). The tape worked fine; there's a bit of play in the P&D uprights even on the OEM bases. Maybe some shims cut...

If the temp. wings don't need to move, at least during the show, I've used a short piece of 1-1/4" pipe and a flange screwed to the stage. You'll need to pad the pipe out with some wraps of gaf tape or similar, since there's ~3/16" of play with 1-1/4" pipe (and of course 1-1/2" is juuuust too big) .

I work at a college, and we can get a "sole source waiver" for specialized equipment or services where there is only a single vendor. Might want to check with your purchasing people and see if that is an option.

Our Unison loves to freeze in odd configurations. When in doubt, reload the config file. Then call ETC if necessary, but 9 times out of 10, reloading Config works for us.

This is pretty much the set-up we have, with the tab tracks hung from the catwalks to either side of the stage. Wish we didn't need them, but the legs would have to be insanely close together to block sightlines to the wings without them.

Hope they recover well and quickly, and that we're all even more careful up in the air.

All fun and games until we start finding glitter in our salmon 5 or 10 years from now. People are being advised not to use even small amounts in their makeup, since it gets into the water cycle. Maybe treat it as hazardous waste.

I hope they get through their run OK, but when I was in HS back in the 70's, we got slapped by Mad Magazine for stealing some material for an evening of one-acts, and had to cancel. Content owners aren't playing, and with social media, they WILL find out. I still think someone ratted us out to...

I'm probably still working on my first hundred muslin flats, and not likely to go much higher, since we switched to hard flats in the mid-90's, so I'll defer to the voice of experience. The process I laid out was how I was trained, and nothing in my experience with white glue (or non-waterproof...

This takes me back! One tip that's always stuck with me, even after a couple decades of hard flats is, when using white glue, remember not to wet the muslin that's glued to the frame when you're sizing or priming the flat. White glue isn't waterproof, and if you wet the frame area at the same...

We had exactly that problem in our theatre pre-remodel. It didn't affect the prefocus or bi-pin base lamps, but the 500W FCLs in our worklights were constantly fusing to, or burning out the contact on the neutral end. They ended up running 10ga neutrals for each 3 12ga hot wires, and that seemed...