JD makes a very good
point, the one thing to always remember about MLs is that they are a computer and computers are only as smart as the people that program them. They may have been very smart people but they still got confused from time to time, therefore MLs will get confused from time to time. Knowing how to reset the particular ML you're using from the board will save many many hours in the air and at the repair
desk.
That being said there is no substitute for first
hand experience. Only experience can tell you that the 4.5mm bolts that hold all the goodies together in a
Clay Paky will sometimes get stuck so hard in their hole that the only way to get them out is to take a Dremel tool and turn the
bolt into a
flat head screw drive
bolt. A repair
manual and a class or two will teach you many useful things and the basic ideas that went into construction and go into repair of a light, but there are lots of other things that can only be learned by experience.
One last example that is a lot less straight forward than the 4.5mm
bolt one. Our Alpha
Wash 1200 HPEs have one static
gobo wheel and two rotation wheels. We noticed that the rotating wheel closest to the static wheel wasn't rotating all the way into position. We bring the light down everything checks out, it runs the test sequence fine, no noticeable problems the rotating wheel looks and runs as well as ever. What's the problem you ask? There is one static
gobo that gets a lot of use, this causes it to
bend, once it's bent about 1/8" it interferes with the rotating wheels motion and causes the problem we were seeing. Why did the wheel pass the test sequence? Because all of our work space is
flat so the
fixture was sitting upright on its
base where in the air its hanging downward from the clamps attached to the
base. Gravity pulls the wheel slightly into the rotating wheel when its upside down and away when its right side up. Would have eventually happened right side up too but not in the relatively little time we had the static wheel in on the test bench. Now that fix takes 30 minutes but you never would have found that in the
Clay Paky repair
manual.