Recent content by jklak

I had to do a repair on an old Altman Dynaspot and I needed a part that is way out of production. I called Altman and accidentally ended up talking to a really helpful guy in their rental department. Their rental department is continually repairing old Altman spots for their rental stock and I...

Hi Chris, The top hats sound like a great idea. I've been thinking of getting the same ones so I'll let you be the guinnea pig and let me know how you like them. If you are using your shakespeares for basic FOH stuff then you probably won't be sticking stuff in the gate/iris slot much...

If you have a board preference make sure you spend some time getting the specs on that. Don't assume that you are going to end up with either a Strand or an ETC. There are plenty of cheap and crappy companies out there that will get a bid on a school project because they are priced much lower...

I got on CB to ask a 360Q lamping question and was surprised to find that the first posting was on lamping 360s. But, alas, my specific question was not answered. So here it is. About 10 years ago I bought some used 360Q 6x16s from BASH lighting and used them for a couple of years as a stop...

We have a Lehigh system and we have had ghosting issues when there has been a power outage. There is a specific restart sequence that has to be followed for our system. You could have a similar situation if your electricians decided to just turn off everything rather than figure out which...

I've spent a lot of time in cherry pickers over the years. Like anything, they are only dangerous if they aren't used properly. The only major accident I have ever been in involved a cherry picker. A student set it up for me and I didn't check to see that it was locked down at the base and...

I just got a couple of the 14 degree ones and it was just what you would expect from a source four. It has a nice clean light that is easy to focus and has a nice sharp focus when you need it to be nice and sharp. I bought the whole instrument. I don't know what just the barrel would cost but...

I pulled out the manual for the dimmer rack and the electrical schematics. We have a Lehigh DX rack (not the DX2 which is a newer version). We have three cabinets and in the third cabinet the breakers for the non-dims are wired in. It says on the schematics that the non-dims (32 of them...

Hi, I did the original post for this and I got swamped with a few events so I haven't been back to the board to see all the brew-ha this started. I am not, repeat not, an electrician and a lot of what you guys are talking about it right over my head. However, I can tell you that we do not...

I think that the non-dims we have installed are strictly non-dim. I'm pretty sure that I can't make them dimmable. If I could I would have loved to have done so to get some more circuits. Is it unlikely that strictly non-dim modules were installed in my rack?

I have a question about "clean" power for automated equipment. I have recently purchased a bunch of new equipment and I will soon be busy running dmx stuff to our catwalks. I have some color scrollers, a couple I-cues, some gobo rotators, and 2 VL1000 TSDs that are due in this week. When I...

It seems like you could reduce the wear and tear on your equipment by limiting what gets used every day. Classes probably don't need several thousand watts of illumination every day. Why don't you point a couple of scoops at the stage and have the classes use those two instruments and the...

I bought a Chauvet 400watt "Black Shadow" for $320.00 from Theatrefx.com and was pretty pleased with the results. I was trying to light UV paint on costumes from a pretty long throw. I regretted not having more than one instrument and yes I had to take my other lighting way down to achieve the...

We are an auditorium doing mostly theatre and I want color matching with my other fixtures.

Do I have this right? Without the onboard dimmer there is one cable coming out of the fixture for the lamp (dimmable circuit) and then a place to plug in an AC transformer for the other elements like gobo rotators, color changing, etc. (into a non-dim circuit). If I get the on-board dimmer...