@brucek Where were you hoping to go with this thread? I'd like to think many single and double purchase counter-weight houses utilize hemp, or similar, spot lines including multi-line spot line sets to add additional full width pipes between their single or double purchase counter-weighted line sets. I miss the old terms and calls; such as: Short short, short, short centre, centre, long centre, long and long long. (Naming and referring to the individual lines in a seven line set.) Calls such as: "Feet on!" and "Feet off!" when the flyman wanted stagehands to hold the pipe tightly to the deck while he took and equalized tension on all the individual lines within a given line set and then when he wanted them to stand clear while he lifted it approximately three or four feet off the deck and took a tie prior to the deck carps securing a drop, or whatever, to the pipe. One of the pains of real hemp was how humidity / moisture affected trims with the longer lines being affected more than the shorter lines resulting in not only changes in trim heights but pipes tilting at angles with reference to the deck. More modern line materials better resisted changes due to humidity / moisture content / temperature. Thanks @brucek for an interesting post sparking many happy memories. (but not the memories of festering slivers from dirty hemp) I don't much miss 100 pound sand bags and bag lines to grunt the bags a little to allow the flyman to re-trim the individual lines within a given line set.Does anyone know of any list of currently working hemp houses in the north east...or anywhere at this point?
Thanks
@gafftapegreenia With two rows of pins, upper and lower: You often tied your 'in' trim on the lower row and your 'out' trim on the upper row. Cheaper, or less well planned, installations had only a single row of pins; you normally tied your 'in' trim on a pin and left it there neat and precise then tied your out trim on an adjacent empty pin if / when you had one. If / when you had no spare adjacent pins, you tied your 'in' trim neat and pretty then overhauled the piece out and tied your 'out' trim on the same pin on top of your 'in' trim without destroying its accuracy. I don't miss the festering slivers from dirty, grimy hemp. Thanks for the memories.@RonHebbard , you make an important point about hybrid spaces. My college’s theatre, built in 1974, has a mid level gallery with a hemp pinrail, in addition to about 35 standard counterweight sets. We used the heck out of the pinrail for single picks, side tabs, and regular line sets for bigger shows. I loved having that flexibility.
@venuetech Understood and agreed. Whenever we had rockers in and had their pre-rigged truss sections supported by one or two of our single-purchase counter-weighted line sets we had to dang near sever their wrists when striking to keep them from removing their trusses prior to our loaders removing any of our counter-weights from our arbors. Trying to get the rockers out of their Loadstar mind set was virtually impossible. Hurry, hurry, hurry! Drop those trusses!!
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