DIY vs. Money
- Thread starterClifford
- Start date
I actually just cleaned shop today. I'm cleaning out our old auditorium to get prepared to move everything to our new PAC and smaller theatre, throw stuff out, and decide what should be sold or given away. We found an entire container filled with extension cords that nobody even knew about, it's 5'x2'x4' and we ended up throwing most of them away. I found everything in there from exposed wires to the ever popular extension cord with 2 quad boxes (4 edison duplex receptacles) connected to one another. Apparently a surge-protector was too hi-tech for them. We also found 8 year old flash powder, an 80 ft (modified) brown extension cord with no ground wire, and one of the more popular finds was a stage pin three-fer. The three-fer has a 2P plug, not to be confused with 2P&G, and then has a square box on the end of it with three 2P&G-F receptacles, accounting for ground pins but serving no grounding function. You'd be amazed what some idiots can concoct when giving opportunities to shine. Where else would you come across top hats that are 2' long made out of a gel frame welded to a stove vent pipe?
Yup, there's an entire building being cleared out, so we have dumpsters, recycling piles for electronics, steel, copper, batteries, fluorescent ballasts, etc. It's a pretty good system. Do you know if the cords would have to be stripped down to the copper to be sold for salvage?
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To follow up on students and wiring... And I'm not saying it should never be done but... Sometimes I am surprised by the mistakes even experienced people make. QUOTE]
Today I found a Par64 with the ground disconnected, the neutral connected to the ground pin and the hot wired to the hot pin.Maybe that was the light that blew that dimmer...
I alo just found a S4par that somebody, instead of connecting the ground wire to the plug, folded the ground wire and slide it back into the fiberglass sheath.
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Not about able to tell the difference between hot, neutral or ground, more about experience in wiring stuff in students beyond liability, no matter how well intentioned, not having time in experiencing sufficiently what might be proper seemingly but missing details. Heck, even after about seven years of college I was at one point wiring up aluminum conductors and rating them at the normal copper amperage, putting crimp fork insulated terminals into Eagle type yellow/chrome type plugs because it seemed to me based on a Union stage plug experience - a better idea. And many other things including given a switch panel with two poles available to fuse, fusing both hot and neutral instead of just one.
No idea at the time - no base of experience or supervision that was qualified to say or explain that this best work ever for me at the time that was based on my understanding and intent was perhaps not the best overall thing to do even if good in intent.
That’s the main concept - experience. Heck at one point early after college here I was sitting down and re-wiring fixtures with this spool of un-used asbestos heat wire I found about the theater in making them “safe” but not knowing any better. The fresh spool of asbestos whips was certainly in better shape than what was on the fixtures... but left something to be desired about my own health future, this much less what others might have in working with the stuff I was paid to rewire.
Way beyond some concept of hot/neutral and ground - very much details such as wire gauge etc.
Noting that what specific fixture these from the AV department was assumed here in getting into the topic of amperage and plugs for them. That’s a starting poing also based on experience be it 2K of 1K Fresnel, or even 2K Fresnel that gets lamped down to 1K. As for adaptor verses plug... why if all twist lock you still have some slip/stage pin about I don’t know, certainly easier to make for a new plug on “safe” =- inspected to be so fixtures.
Students short of very qualified supervision should not be wiring stuff. They are there to learn but not to do without that supervision. Research before hand is good but only eyes on the subject by those trained in the field can truely verify what you read is correct for any one situation. Never do without trained and qualified supervision there with you.
Had a college kid assistant that finished a 2Kw scoop wiring project for me at one point. Luckily we signed that repair sticker on each fixture we worked on because after training at some point he started forgetting to install some wee parts that made his later fixtures short to frame. This similar to an older kid (as it were) that forgot after wiring up a bunch of older S-4 fixtures to install the mica shelding in them. Yea that took a while - a long while to weed out her fixtures longer than that the kid assistant has wired and signed his name to.
Gee, it works - just as long as gravity and bouncing the fixture about don’t matter.
Reason for both in making the mistakes, this even if shown how to do it properly, they didn’t fully understand the why of the information overload in steps to do in properly wiring the fixtures. That’s a problem.
Heck, even yesterday I had to stop one of my assistants in noting that his L21-30 plug he was about to install had inversely stripped wire to what the wire gauge on the plug told him to strip. He stripped the insulation for what he should have been stripping the conductor length.
IN other words, his stripped wire was about twice as long as it should have been. This from a guy that for about two years now has worked for me but not as much worked with this type of cable. Granted he has worked with this cable in the past, and should in a way that nobody taught me have learned in the past time some concept by now, but he didn’t. His sentence, keep doing it alone for the next ten cables until hopefully he learns the strip length to an extent that even if he doesn’t wire another cable for another year of this type, he will remember it due to experience now.
Have not wired a Union plug in a few years now.... still remember the strip length as with that of other plugs. That’s both experience and immediate and training. Gotta have it, short of that seek inspection by qualified personal and don’t attempt it on your own.
Well the big problem was out of that pile of 18 or so instruments, I had no way of knowing which ones each of us had done, so I had to go through each one separately and correct the incorrect ones. It sucked, and it was pretty frustrating because we didn't exactly have much time. Plus, I had some pretty good friction blisters going on by now, but I am glad I found out before they went up to the grid where I hot focused them. (Background: This theatre had a large semicircle thrust with a non-movable lighting grid directly above the chorus line). But what if I had never found out?
Maybe I should have known, after all, he was the same guy who once three-fer'd a Strand Iris cyc light and tried to plug it in to a backstage wall outlet using a 3-pin to edison adaptor. The result of that was a good-sized burst of sparks as soon as the plug was put in the receptacle. The lights didn't come on and it destroyed the adapter. Interestingly enough, it didn't trip the breaker.
I guess the point of these stories is; even people like this guy, with years of electronics classes and technical theatre experience, sometimes don't think.[/QUOTE]
Gee, it works - just as long as gravity and bouncing the fixture about don’t matter.
Reason for both in making the mistakes, this even if shown how to do it properly, they didn’t fully understand the why of the information overload in steps to do in properly wiring the fixtures. That’s a problem.
Heck, even yesterday I had to stop one of my assistants in noting that his L21-30 plug he was about to install had inversely stripped wire to what the wire gauge on the plug told him to strip. He stripped the insulation for what he should have been stripping the conductor length.
IN other words, his stripped wire was about twice as long as it should have been. This from a guy that for about two years now has worked for me but not as much worked with this type of cable. Granted he has worked with this cable in the past, and should in a way that nobody taught me have learned in the past time some concept by now, but he didn’t. His sentence, keep doing it alone for the next ten cables until hopefully he learns the strip length to an extent that even if he doesn’t wire another cable for another year of this type, he will remember it due to experience now.
Have not wired a Union plug in a few years now.... still remember the strip length as with that of other plugs. That’s both experience and immediate and training. Gotta have it, short of that seek inspection by qualified personal and don’t attempt it on your own.
Well the big problem was out of that pile of 18 or so instruments, I had no way of knowing which ones each of us had done, so I had to go through each one separately and correct the incorrect ones. It sucked, and it was pretty frustrating because we didn't exactly have much time. Plus, I had some pretty good friction blisters going on by now, but I am glad I found out before they went up to the grid where I hot focused them. (Background: This theatre had a large semicircle thrust with a non-movable lighting grid directly above the chorus line). But what if I had never found out?
Maybe I should have known, after all, he was the same guy who once three-fer'd a Strand Iris cyc light and tried to plug it in to a backstage wall outlet using a 3-pin to edison adaptor. The result of that was a good-sized burst of sparks as soon as the plug was put in the receptacle. The lights didn't come on and it destroyed the adapter. Interestingly enough, it didn't trip the breaker.
I guess the point of these stories is; even people like this guy, with years of electronics classes and technical theatre experience, sometimes don't think.[/QUOTE]
If you have to make 2-fers, or various other multi-cable breakouts, Mcmaster-Carr carries adhesive lined, heat shrink breakout boots. I have used these on many custom breakouts and 2-fers I've had to make for the Pageant. While they're not cheap, they're the best solution I've found for making splices and breakouts safe.
As several previous posts have, hopefully, made clear, you have to be meticulous with electrical work. If you're not, you make mistakes. When dealing with electricity, mistakes can be fatal.
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