Prepping Trusses for Pre-Rig/Tours

[ledko]

Hello Everyone,

Wanted to post a question for the group; I'm curious as to what you all think is the best method for labeling Touring or Pre-Rigged Truss for ease of load-in on site.

For instance, let's say you have a 100' length of swing wing, with all the lights hung and circuited, broken at 10' intervals for shipping. How do you label the ends of your truss so that the local crews understand how to put it together?

I've seen several different methods, ranging from colored Gaffers Tape with Letters or Numbers, custom labels taped on with clear tape, or different colored bands of electrical tape.

I'm a fan of E-tape bands, but you can only do so many color combinations before it can get confusing.

What's your tried and true method?

 

[soundman]

Truss ends always get a directions, SR, SL, DS, or US. Truss joints get a number 1 to 1, 2 to 2. so a stick of truss will be SR on one side and 1 on the other. The next stick in line will be 1 on one side and 2 on the other. So as truss is rolling in I can ask the hands to spin it so the higher number goes SL. Like anything after a few sticks of truss the hands will get the pattern. All labeling should read the same way, so that if you walk on the side of the truss all the numbers either read correctly or upside down.

If the shop will do stickers, great. If it is a long tour I will use E tape to color code and the a P touch sticker to label the end. Wrap it in book binding or marley tape and it will last long enough for most tours. For throw and go one offs a strip of gaff in the right color and a sharpie will most likely be good enough.

 

[Pie4Weebl]

I like the way they do it and Bandit, SR and SL are labeled and then each joint has a number expressed through bands of tape.

 

[Footer]

100' straight of swing wing? Sounds like a party of not fun. 1" P-Touch and colors are going to be your friend. Upstage/downstage or SL/SR on each piece as well.

 

[porkchop]

Locals have seen about everything and are smarter than most people give them credit for. Do whatever make sense to your road crew. Just make sure that it is standardized for all trusses on the show, visible from a reasonable distance away (at least 10'), and easy for the road crew to recreate on site if need be.

Personally I've always been a fan of each truss gets it's own color of e-tape. The far SR truss section has no tape on the SR side and one stripe on the SL joint. From there you just match, one stripe to one stripe, two stripes to two stripes. You can look at the truss and count the stripes and know that the lower number of stripes goes towards SR. There are ~10 distinct colors of e-tape (depending on if count grey and if you can find pink), if you have more truss sections than that to mark, I would go with P-Touch and hope they hired good road guys.

 

[RonaldBeal]

Adding stripes to truss sucks for long runs. Try telling at a quick glance if that piece has eight stripes or nine stripes! Numbers, written clearly, are faster. Like the others here posited, I label the ends with US/DS, or SR/SL and then number from SR or US so my truss would be labeled
SR-1, 1-2, 2-3. 3-4. 4-5, 5-SL

Each span of truss gets a separate color. (or colors) depending on how many trusses there are. I use 2" Gaff tape for the main color, and will use 1" gaff or electrical tape for secondary colors. Number goes on the primary tape. I use white paint pens on dark colored gaff (Brown, dark green, dark blue) and I use a large black marker on light tape colors.

For grids, I still use separate colors for each span... so a grid with three SR->SL spans, and connected on the ends I might do
DS= Red
MS= White
US= Blue
SR Up/down connecting span = Orange
SL Up/down connecting span = Yellow

This gives me SR corners that are Orange/Red, Orange/White, and Orange/Blue

Hope that makes sense

RB

 

[porkchop]

Adding stripes to truss sucks for long runs.

Never used stripes for more than 6 sections. Much more would be a pain.