# Rigging in new auditorium?



## NewChris (Aug 2, 2014)

Our high school is being totally renovated and I received the floor plans today. I was looking at them and saw some stuff about the new rigging.

. What do those terms mean? Terms like "fly floor above" and "rigging pit". Thanks. I also only saw these on this one plan and not on any other views.


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## BillConnerFASTC (Aug 2, 2014)

These are much easier to explain in an elevation than in a plan, and if you are the person who will use this you should be given an exxplanation by whomever designed the system. The fly floor above could refer to a couple of things, may be a loading bridge, a fly gallery for ropes, or an elevated lock rail, and maybe more. Rigging pit [AKA arbor pit] is simply a pit or trench or slot in the floor to allow more travel of the lineset. Assuming manual, the important issues are high trim, travel, and capacity. It all goes back to that. Also make sure there is a loading bridge properly positioned to load and unload arbors when batten is at low trim. Yup, this all shows up in the elevation, which I draw before drawing a plan when designing a stage.

High trim, travel, capacity - and be sure there is a loading bridge. A gridiron or modified gridiron would be next on my list.

I could give you more or less confidence if I knew who the designer was.


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## NewChris (Aug 3, 2014)

I am a student who requested the plans out of curiosity. This are not the final plans so I assume more detail will be added. The only name I have on it is "Symmes Maini & McKee Associates".


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## Euphroe (Aug 8, 2014)

A high school student who requested the drawings, pulled out the plan view and asked for interpretation? That's really great. If you want to blow somebody away, look up Symmes et al. , phone them, ask for the project architect for the school, and ask if the auditorium elevation or detail sheets are available. You'll only take a moment of his/her day and it'll probably be the first time they fielded such a call from an interested student. 

Bill is right, an elevation view would clarify it for you.

But the plan view indicates the lock rail and arbor pit together, so probably the lock rail is at stage level. The arbors descend into a pit to allow more travel than if they stopped at the floor. 

The fly floor is presumably a loading bridge above, like a broad catwalk. As Bill indicates it may also have a rail for spotlines. 

The welch or tension blocks will be at the bottom of the pit. Bill can speak to the proper way to do this, but I've generally seen conventional welch blocks in that position. If so, when you need to slack the purchase lines for certain manipulations, you have to poke a stick into the pit and push down on the onstage edge of the welch blocks to release them. Like a 2x4. 

The elevation below is of a typical system, courtesy the JR Clancy site. Notice the lock rail overhangs the pit. You can see the same overhang on your plan view, where the "Edge Of Pit Below" is onstage of the lockrail. 

I'm super impressed that a student obtained the drawing and asked about it. A lot of stagehands have worked entire careers and shown a fraction of that level of interest. You are going to do well at whatever you settle on, so dream big. 



Yocan see


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## AlexDonkle (Aug 15, 2014)

Just to add, the drawings you're looking at are the architectural plans. Every discipline on the design team generally has their own set of drawings that start with different letters (e.g. A-101 would be an architectural floor plan showing walls and flooring, M-101 would show mechanical ducts, E-101 would should power outlets and circuits, etc.). Most likely there's a set of sheets that show the rigging in higher detail as well (varies between jobs, but sometimes they start with TR-101, RS-101, or QT-101).


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## tjrobb (Aug 15, 2014)

Yeah, it would be a T_ for theatrical. S sets have structure, and may give an idea of weight capacity.


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## NewChris (Aug 15, 2014)

adonkle said:


> Just to add, the drawings you're looking at are the architectural plans. Every discipline on the design team generally has their own set of drawings that start with different letters (e.g. A-101 would be an architectural floor plan showing walls and flooring, M-101 would show mechanical ducts, E-101 would should power outlets and circuits, etc.). Most likely there's a set of sheets that show the rigging in higher detail as well (varies between jobs, but sometimes they start with TR-101, RS-101, or QT-101).



The plans I got are just parts of the entire plans of the school. They say that they aren't for construction and could be changed. I did not get any pages with a "T" letter, they all are start with "A". I will email them and see if those are available. The auditorium isn't scheduled to be opened until September 2015.


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## Timothy A. Samuelson (Aug 16, 2014)

If it's a preliminary construction set, the technical things will be difficult to interpret. Typically, in the pre-contracted phase of architectural design, I would put in the basics so the approving party understood the project and changes could easily be made. Sometimes, by the end of a design process, I'd have 15-20 completely different drawing sets in my computer. Any trip to a proposal or person asking questions didn't get a full set. I wasn't going to plot a full set if I could get the point across in 6 pages. Plotting's not cheap. (keep in mind, I used to design car dealerships that had pre approved image packages. How the clients found ways to change the design so many times yet still have basically the same end product will forever confuse me.) On another note, I can't tell you how impressed I am to see a student so willing to understand things to go through the trouble of requesting drawings and then asking questions about the things you don't understand. Keep up the good work!


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## BillConnerFASTC (Aug 16, 2014)

We design rigging first - capacity, high trim, travel - and suggest a structural framing system, and then help architect and structural engineer design around it. Too many stupid things happen when rigging is stuck in at the end. I believe this approach results in much less redesign later in design and makes building and systems more economical.


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