Okay, I seem to be starting a lot of threads lately, but hey I'm not in school and I don't have any shows in pre-production (though as soon as I get busy with school I'm sure I will have about 3).
So, to the real question. We have this one Strand Leko up on the catwalk that seems to be doing the impossible. A couple of years ago I was focusing and I jiggled the socket/cap thingy of this light (which wasn't working at the time). The next thing I know the light flashes on for a second and I'm fairly sure that it somehow shorted from the raised handle looking thing to the grounded housing of the fixture through my hand (it hurt!). At the time I was too freaked out by our TD (I'd never worked with him before and my first 2 hours with him consisted of learning to coil cables properly and he was the first pro I'd worked with) to insist that he look at it. So come focus a couple of months ago ant the same thing happens!!! This time I unplug it to wait til we have time to fix it (the show I was small and I couldn't do anything about it then). Two weeks later we have big dance show, I told our TD (who I now work with a lot and am not the least bit intimidated by --unless I just messed up on something stupid). Bring the light down and meters it, fine; he takes the entire socket/ cap apart and can't find a single thing wrong with it(other than the lamp blew when it shorted)!
Has anybody seen something like this? How could this be happening? I'm not too worried about that happening again because it hurts, but oh well. What does scare me is that somebody will be holding something grounded with their other hand and this will happen. Saddly, this is very intermittent and whenever I've tried to replicate it it hasn't worked.
My elecronics teacher did suggest that it could be going hrough the insulation because of the really high current. Is that a possibility? What else should I check for? I'd really like to fix this or at least prove there is a problem (to the best of my knowledge this hasn't happened to anybody else, but I also do most of the focusing) so my TD will stop thinking I'm crazy. Thanks for any ideas anone might have.
So, to the real question. We have this one Strand Leko up on the catwalk that seems to be doing the impossible. A couple of years ago I was focusing and I jiggled the socket/cap thingy of this light (which wasn't working at the time). The next thing I know the light flashes on for a second and I'm fairly sure that it somehow shorted from the raised handle looking thing to the grounded housing of the fixture through my hand (it hurt!). At the time I was too freaked out by our TD (I'd never worked with him before and my first 2 hours with him consisted of learning to coil cables properly and he was the first pro I'd worked with) to insist that he look at it. So come focus a couple of months ago ant the same thing happens!!! This time I unplug it to wait til we have time to fix it (the show I was small and I couldn't do anything about it then). Two weeks later we have big dance show, I told our TD (who I now work with a lot and am not the least bit intimidated by --unless I just messed up on something stupid). Bring the light down and meters it, fine; he takes the entire socket/ cap apart and can't find a single thing wrong with it(other than the lamp blew when it shorted)!
Has anybody seen something like this? How could this be happening? I'm not too worried about that happening again because it hurts, but oh well. What does scare me is that somebody will be holding something grounded with their other hand and this will happen. Saddly, this is very intermittent and whenever I've tried to replicate it it hasn't worked.
My elecronics teacher did suggest that it could be going hrough the insulation because of the really high current. Is that a possibility? What else should I check for? I'd really like to fix this or at least prove there is a problem (to the best of my knowledge this hasn't happened to anybody else, but I also do most of the focusing) so my TD will stop thinking I'm crazy. Thanks for any ideas anone might have.