Methods on Storing Light Cables...

[etc]

So I am working on a project at my high school on a way to store all of our lighting equipment, mainly the cords, we probably have over 200 cords in different lengths and I need a way to store them in a small area... i would be ok in building something because i want it to be easy to put away and organize all of our cords any ideas are great and pics on how you do it would be great as well.

 

[Anvilx]

Well I use milk crates and put different types of cords in each crate, it works well for me.(But it sounds like you have a much bigger facility then me) The best part about the crates is that you can stack them.
I have always wanted to try one of those ata cable trunks with the dividers, anyone have any experience with those?

 

[erosing]

Most of the venues I work in use a rack with pegs for the cables to hang on coiled nicely, makes it easy on a hang so that the most used cables can be brought out on stage with said rack. Then their is the same peg style hangers on a wall in the light lock for the rest of the cables that don't fit on the rack.

 

[eternalfire1244]

We used pegs on the wall for most of the cable and a road case for the SOCA. Not so bad as it uses the vertical space fairly well and keeps various lengths organized. It would be more useful if the rack was on wheels, but we can all dream. Considering 99% of our gear stayed in the air there was never really a whole lot to store.

 

[soundlight]

I prefer shelf brackets to hang cables on if you may need to change the configuration later. Put a few vertical runs of shelf bracket mounting track on a wall, and attach the appropriate length brackets for the cables you'll be putting on them.

Here's an example of the shelf brackets I'm talking about, and here's an example of the bracket track.

 

[derekleffew]

Milk crates don't work so good with 100' 12/3 SOOW cables. Great for XLR cables however.

...It would be more useful if the rack was on wheels, but we can all dream. ...

I've built a few cable carts--usually a "wall of pegs" on casters.

Alternatively, a favorite of mine for storing cable (and as an alternative to meatracks for fixtures) is a chair cart:

Hanging Folded Chair Storage Truck - Full Size
The only drawback is most won't fit through a standard doorway. Now I'd probably never buy one of these specifically for this purpose (I'd find a friend who's a welder), but they are common items in many schools' surplus area.

[Thread moved from "New Member Board" to "Lighting."]

 

[abbyt]

For smaller cable (data cable and such), milk crates, peg board, or something similar to the rolling chair rack Derek suggested.

For larger cable, the rolling chair rack is one good idea, but my favorite, by far, is color-coded 55 gallon drums on wheeled bases. Color code = length of cable. We've used this method in our rental shop for years, and it works out very well...

-Abby

 

[cprted]

All of our A/C cable is stored on large brackets on the US wall. Keeps things organized and always close at hand.

 

[gcpsoundlight]

By far the best method, If you have the money, time, and space, is to have custom road cases built. Then you can wheel them around and if they are all the same size, stack them. But with each case costing around $500 (Aud), it is not cheap. But it will probably offer more protection than crates.

 

[MNicolai]

By far the best method, If you have the money, time, and space, is to have custom road cases built. Then you can wheel them around and if they are all the same size, stack them. But with each case costing around $500 (Aud), it is not cheap. But it will probably offer more protection than crates.

Road cases are pretty overkill for this application, particularly because it's a school where the cables are probably never going to walk out the door unless they're being thrown out. If it was a touring group, road cases would be best, but for this, I think there are better solutions for just in-house storage.

The best solution I've seen is a similar principle to that folding chair rack, except built out of wood with a plywood center divider and fewer pegs, but all made of wood (roughly the quality of wood used for the standard handrail), but still double sided. This gives you a nice portable rack that you can use to store and organize your cables on which can easily be used transport them between a shop or closet and the stage area.

On the bottom of the cart, you would have a plywood platform and put maybe an 18" (give or take) tall rim around the entire cart so that a few loose cables can travel securely on the bottom as well.

If you don't want a portable solution, then a similar principle works for walls as well. Find one the school will let you use, and put as many pegs on it as you need. Try to keep it close to the stage, though. Each time you go for another cable shouldn't be like adventuring into the Amazon.

 

[kiwitechgirl]

I worked in a venue where we kept our cables in shopping trolleys - the cables were divided into short, medium and long lengths and we simply had a trolley for each. Portable, fitted through a door easily and held lots of cables. You could obviously use more if you want to be more specific about the lengths of cable you're dividing into, but it was a really good solution. I'm not 100% sure where the trolleys were acquired from (and whether it was legit!) as the venue was next door to a shopping centre - but you can probably get them fairly easily if you can find the right people to ask!

 

[fx120]

At our shop, all of our heavy soca, feeder, and distro 10/5 10/4 lives in homemade wood cadillacs, and our 12/3 lives in wood containers that we built this summer out of 1/2" birch plywood, with the front floor beveled so they can tip forward, but when they're up they store nicely underneath all the palate racking we have.

Either solution can be built fairly inexpensively.

Personally I have never liked hanging up A/C cables. They're bulky, heavy, and personally I've got a lot of them. Hanging might look good and be an easy way to grab exactly the cable you want, but it's about the most inefficient way to store them.

If I was in your position, I would be building about 4-5 30"x30"x30" wooden cube cases with or without lids on casters. Paint em' black with a color coded stripe around the top indicating the length of the cables inside. At our shop we use this system:

Purple - 3'
Orange - 5'
Green - 10'
Yellow - 25'
Red - 50'
Blue - 100'

Any combination of stripes is summed, so a Purple and orange stripe would be a 8' cable, two greens would be 20', and so forth.

Cables are grouped by approximate length, the shorties all live in one case with 5's, 8's and 10's, 15's - 30's go together, then 50's and 100's get their own cases

 

[derekleffew]

kiwitechgirl, do you mean these?

Unarco--Product Information

In the US, we call those shopping carts, and their use is frowned upon outside of a store.

FWIW, they cost a quarter (25¢ US) at Aldi's.

Why do I need a quarter to use a shopping cart at ALDI?
At ALDI, we cut costs every way we can to keep prices low. Our shopping cart deposit system is a good example. You insert a quarter to release a cart. When you return the cart, you get your quarter back. This system cuts down on the labor of collecting carts left in the parking lot, damage to cars, and we pass the savings on to you.

 

[mstaylor]

I agree that hanging AC cables is a bad idea. There have been a number of good stacking solutions already.

 

[JD]

Good old plywood "hell" case! Use to build them as a case within a case, but they could be made as an open design like a flat cart. About 3' by 3'. Heavy cables are stacked on the outside section, data cables coiled and stacked on the inside section. I am a big proponent of not looping heavy cables any tighter then three feet, and don't like the hanging systems that leave a single pressure point on the cable.

 

[BillESC]

In my shop we built 2' x 4' x 2' open top plywood boxes on casters. The cables simply stack in the box according to size. When not in use, they roll under the first row of shelving.

We have them for AC, XLR, feeder and DMX cables.

 

[Lotos]

In my shop we built 2' x 4' x 2' open top plywood boxes on casters. The cables simply stack in the box according to size. When not in use, they roll under the first row of shelving.

Ditto, well, ours have lids... Since we have two with castors, and two without that ride on top. Cables are coiled up neatly inside.
The lighter, emptier, more commonly accessed cable 'trunks' live on top...
IE: XLR Trunk (Divided into 3-Pin, 4-Pin Chroma Q, 4-Pin Color Kinetics) and 5/10 foot cable and Two-Fer Trunk.
The 15/20 foot Trunk and the 25+ & Soca Trunk live on the bottom.

We turn shows over every two months, mind you... Some are small Box Set Comedies, which require very little Data Cable or much Soca... But we keep enough cable on hand to manage the huge Christmas Shows and Big Musicals... So half the year these trunks are full, a quarter of the year half full, and a quarter of the year they're mostly empty...

For storage, they roll conveniently into a nice space in the hallway next to our TD's office... He doesn't seem to mind They're painted black, and glazed, so they even look nice from the outside.

It's also important to make sure your cables are identified with length marks... Electrical Tape Coloured Marks a foot or so from the connector, covered in clear heat shrink works wonders. Paste a copy of the legend to this system wherever cable is stored.

 

[shiben]

kiwitechgirl, do you mean these?

Unarco--Product Information

In the US, we call those shopping carts, and their use is frowned upon outside of a store.

FWIW, they cost a quarter (25¢ US) at Aldi's.

Before you go rippin them off of a shopping center, just ask the management if they are replacing their carts any time soon. The school I go to has nearly 100 of these things from when mijer replaced all their carts, and they donated them to all kinds of groups in the area, and we got a pile of them. Another kind of cart is the soft goods hampers. These are nearly identical to the carts that large cleaning companies use, and the older ones can often be picked up for a song (literally). Replace the casters with some big ones, and you have a sizable cart for cables. At our venue, we have a rack on wheels with 16 pipes sticking out, each painted a different color, and cables are painted (female end only, just a stripe) in colors going up in incements of 5' until after 35', at which point its everything else and has its length written on it in addition to a stripe. We got this from a number of large local houses that have similar cable inventories.

 

[NJLX]

we have 2 cable carts in each of our spaces.
the bottom section is a roughly 2' tall box separated into sections, therefore we have four 2' cubes, one for 100', 50', 25', 15' (cables are divided by approximate length)

sticking out of the top of these are pipes, about 3' tall with a horizontal pipe between them and pegs(actually pipe) sticking out of the horizontal pipe, perpendicular to it. these are labeled on the end, whether for 10', 5', 2', two-fers, or edison cable.

In our largest space we have additional boxes(cubes on wheels, really) for socapex and other cables, again sorted by length.

I can take pictures when i get back to school in a week or so.

 

[zuixro]

Sortof off topic, but when I first started working at my old job, we were loading in for a graduation ceremony on the football field of a local highschool. We came up 15 feet short of feeder, so someone went to go pick some up. When he got back, he had a small purple roadcase on wheels, but he put it on the trailer of the golfcart thing we were using. I thought "That's weird, it's 15 feet of cable, why didn't he just carry it over here." Then I realized that it was 5 strands of cable, each as big around as my thumb.

So yeah, a 15' section of feeder with it's own roadcase.