Ballrooms

[AlexDonkle]

Curious from anyone here that works on ballroom events frequently, what's the smallest room size you typically see requests for putting up temporary rigging trusses for?

 

[jstroming]

You mean truss hung with motors or any truss?

 

[AlexDonkle]

You mean truss hung with motors or any truss?

Truss hung with motors, essentially I'm curious what the smallest ballroom size is before having fixed rigging points above the ceiling starts to be useful.

 

[RickR]

Leviton Skyhooks or ETC RLPs cover the in-between areas for me. Light rigging or just hang a light...

 

[MikeJ]

Almost all ballrooms have some sort of rigging points in my area. Some are only moderately useful. 12' to the bottom of a truss is about the lowest I want to hang anything. So overall height to the ceiling needs to be about 15' or higher.
I run into a lot of places that have perfectly good 1000 lbs + point, that are only rated for an almost useless 500 lbs, simply because the hotel asked an engineer "can we hang 500 lbs on this?" Rather than "what is the maximum weight we can hang on this."

But as far as Usefulness goes, except for where a couple speakers on sticks will cover it, almost any time you can fly PA its going to sound better than ground stacked. Lighting can become a moot point in a small room, if I can get a similar angle from a pair of 15' towers with a couple lekos on each, as a flown truss that can only get to 12' off the ground, yeah it still looks like crap, but a lot of times its not worth the extra work and cost of riggers at that point.

 

[tjrobb]

You want useless? The engineer at our city's convention center used a tube to drop the points from the truss. Meaning nothing can be bridled. Oh, and somehow we are "missing" a set of points in the 10 X 10 spacing they should have (minimum 20' length of truss).

 

[MikeJ]

You want useless? The engineer at our city's convention center used a tube to drop the points from the truss. Meaning nothing can be bridled. Oh, and somehow we are "missing" a set of points in the 10 X 10 spacing they should have (minimum 20' length of truss).

A tube or pipe is pretty common the theaters with a lot of plaster ant architecture below the rigging steel, but you cannot bridle in this case anyway, without tearing into the plaster. Depending on the spacing and what you needs are, you could possibly H-bridle between those points.