Conventional Fixtures Do you use a fixture's "integral safety attachment point"?

[Diarmuid]

As there was a current thread about safety chains, I remembered a question I had been meaning to ask for quite a while.

Is it wrong to 'choke' a safety chain around a bar? As in when having a chain thats attatched to a fixture, then take the end with the clip over the bar and click back onto the safety cable.
I've always understood that by doing this, it allowed a greater drop,thus exerting a greater strain on the cable.

As such I've always believed that its safer, and better practice to try and clip onto the wire loop at the far end of the cable from the clip, or if possible clip it onto a fixture point, as shown in gafftaper's diagram above.

I'd be interested on what everyone else thinks.

 

[LekoBoy]

Is it wrong to 'choke' a safety chain around a bar? As in when having a chain thats attatched to a fixture, then take the end with the clip over the bar and click back onto the safety cable.
I've always understood that by doing this, it allowed a greater drop,thus exerting a greater strain on the cable.

As such I've always believed that its safer, and better practice to try and clip onto the wire loop at the far end of the cable from the clip, or if possible clip it onto a fixture point, as shown in gafftaper's diagram above.

A loop gives you two runs of cable and a shorter distance to take the weight, but a conventional fixture dropped from a single full length of a safety cable cannot possible break the cable, provided every thing is made out of rated materials. The swl of 1/8" 7x19 is 340 lbs. A 20 lb. light would have to fall way farther than the length of the cable to generate a force greater than the swl.

 

[MNicolai]

Now those homemade safety cables that some people have shamelessly lying about, those may not take a drop, even clipped to the loop.

 

[gafftaper]

After recent discussion in another thread I want to give an update to my technique for using safety cables above. I've been attaching all my safeties this way for about 2 1/2 years now. I have standard 30" cables and a collection of ETC and Selecon equipment. In all that time I've never found myself using a fixture without a safety cable and I've never had a cable too short to reach around the batten and back to the safety bond. I strongly encourage everyone to try using this technique. Yes it slows me down by about 10-15 seconds, but it's far safer as the C-clamp AND yoke can BOTH fail and the instrument will not fall.

 

[TheLightmaster]

I either just loop the safety around the yoke and the bar, clipping to the yoke, or choke the cable to the bar and clip to the safety point, depending on whether the fixture has a point and how i feel that day. Ive started stuffing the loop through the point and pulling the other end through, then choking that to the bar. I have used some instruments that have a point so small its unusable. Occasionally, when i pan the fixtures, a safety looped around the bar can get stuck between the fixture and yoke, which requires some brute force to fix.

 

[jcslighting]

I actually had no idea that such a point existed on conventional fixtures. I had always used the integrated points on movers but always put the safety cable through the yoke on conventional fixtures. Sometimes accessories such as scrollers go around the pipe if the cable reaches if not I try to go through the yoke and also through the other safety cable- if that makes sense.

As a side note, I wish I had enough fixtures made since 1990 to try this out!