melting connectors...

w3st0n21

Active Member
so last night, which was the opening night of Grease, we had a little problem after the show. i was standing in the booth with the sound tech (who also helps me with lights when he isnt doing sound) and we hear the stage manager yell back to the booth something to the effect of "your lights are on fire!" which of course sets off a red flag in my head. (mainly because i had borrowed 10 scrollers from my church and would hate to see those go up in flames) so i turn down all the faders on the board and run up on stage to find a smoking/melting/shorting out connector that one of the strip lights was connected too. ben (the sound tech) grabbed the fire extinguisher just in case it did catch on fire, while i went up to the patch panel and unpatched that circuit and cut the power to the dimmers. the whole time we kept people off the stage and away from the molten liquid plastic dropping from the ceiling and got the drama teacher and the maintnance staff in there. so just goes to show that a few high school techs can handle more problems than some might think :grin:
 
So did you figure out what went wrong so something like this doesn't happen again?
 
That's what I'm thinking.

It's funny that I've seen more melted Twists and Edisons than Stagepin, and I've probably worked more with Stagepin.

That might be because Edisons and Twistlocks usually use a screw which the wire wraps around (or in some cases, the wire is pushed in and tightened between two plates and held in by friction), while stage pins use those push-in connectors (what are those called, where the leads are pushed straight in to the back of the pins?) or ring terminals.
 
The maintnance staff told me they need to be locked. (I sorta figured they didn't need to be, but in a high school situation it doesn't hurt to lock them. I didn't make the repair myself so I wouldn't know if it was a loose screw or not.
 

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