I don't have any instruments with a built-in attachment point. Just PAR 64s, 56s, and 38s, Altman 360s, and a couple of Shakespeares.Almost every conventional fixture since the mid 1990s has a built-in safety attachment point. Do you use it?
My answer is yes always and sometimes because of different fixtures such as Par 64s and such.. most of the time I make a loop through the safety point and through the yoke and around the pipe clipping back onto the noose so I feel protected against clamp and yoke failure.. maybe it's overkill and I can't imagine some of these clutches or bolts shearing, but I live in south central Illinois and we had a quake with aftershocks here a few months ago.. nothing fell but quite a few lamps were pretty loose up there, so I'm glad I had safeties on everything.. don't mean to be such a dork, but it's just the right way to do things I think.
I don't know "yoke joint", but the Strand series below (on the left, LEKO with a star in the "O") had the attachment (two actually) on the side of the body, opposite the tilt-lock. Clever design, but I pissed off others when I used it.
My EC Parellisphere has a non-forged eye-bolt just behind the top shutter, 'course it weighs about 30 lbs. It may have been the first theatrical fixture to have an attachment point. Film/TV fixtures (Mole-Richardson, Bardwell-McCallister, et al.) had them for years before that.
Far be it from me to "get anal", butt...
I have a feeling that most safety cables would not be long enough for that trick to work on all but the most straight down of focuses but if you had a source for longer ones you would have some.
As mentioned before, we have detached one side of the yoke and passed the loop end thru it. That way there is always a safety with the instruments. I love this method, becasue the is no excuse, however we have found that when the instruments are NOT hung, there is an issue of the safety actually becoming a hazard. We have had numerous people trip by putting their foot thru a looped safety while the fixture was on the ground waiting to be hung.
As mentioned before, we have detached one side of the yoke and passed the loop end thru it. That way there is always a safety with the instruments. I love this method, becasue the is no excuse, however we have found that when the instruments are NOT hung, there is an issue of the safety actually becoming a hazard. We have had numerous people trip by putting their foot thru a looped safety while the fixture was on the ground waiting to be hung.
I actually just looped safety cables through all of our safety points on our S4's. As a school, we have too much difficulty with lights being hung without cables, or the cables wandering off, and with the general risk that a student fails to safely hang a light, I need to know those lights aren't going anywhere if something happens. It's a little different for those who have more assurance each light is hung with a cable and is strongly held on by its c-clamp.
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