And I agree with Strad on the Restrictor - just have never sipped the Tiffin kool-aid on that one. Train and retain people right. Maybe you can dumb down equipment enough so no training or plain competence is necessary, but who is going to maintain the basics for
safety in an assembly occupancy if not the "
theatre guy/gal"? The folks that run the rigging are usually the same ones that make sure the basic
auditorium is safe from means of
egress and so on.
Old-school riggers argue against fall protection by saying people who rely on it get sloppy, and to simply hire good riggers who won't fall and not amateurs. Everybody has now sipped the
lanyard Kool-Aid and we've dumbed down high rigging. Why not rope locks?
Current rope lock designs pre-date the Model T Ford, literally. That Restrictors are too safe compared to traditional 50lb locks, is an argument against any
safety advance. A kid who grows up with front wheel drive and ABS brakes might crash an older car someday, but we take that chance.
I specced Restrictors on a specialized application for touring shows, and the locks were super reliable in operation. We could not have built a usable
system with
conventional locks in our application.
Carl Sagan couldn't put a number on the crashed sets in high schools over the years. Most of these real-world accidents could be prevented by an incremental
advance in rope lock design. I cannot see the argument that we should live with an unceasing clatter of real-world accidents because some hypothetical student exposed to a Restrictor will later crash a set on his first day as a flyman at the Met.
And if he walks into the Met and releases a lock on a set that is 400lbs out of weight and not snubbed, who left it like that?
* * * *
I agree, catwalks are great.
Acoustics are icing on the cake, once basic needs are met.
Among countless other wonders, I saw a number of school auditoriums originally planned for a flyhouse, then budget-cutting resulted in deleting the top 20' - 30' of the flyhouse from the plan. In two cases the
counterweight systems remained in the spec and actually got built, with barely enough fly space to get the curtain hems 5' off the floor. This is the kind of application where a contractor might propose a
line winch LX because the building was not constructed with catwalks but does have loft steel.
A school in San Francisco asked me to price to "synthetic purhase lines" to reduce friction. The
system was 70 years old. It had been built with double-purchased arbors, but single-purchased liftlines, all running over a single-purchase
head block. So the
purchase line was trying to run at 2x the speed of the lift lines and had to skid through the
sheave. No slick rope was going to help. It had been this way for decades and nobody knew better. Again, this is the kind of stuff rigging contractors see in the field and you solve it as best you can, sometimes with a mix of dead-hungs and upgraded LX sets.
* * * * * * *
That injured kid launched into the fly loft -- was he holding a
batten? That's an old problem -- 10 guys holding an unloaded
batten while the set is unsnubbed so the
arbor can be eased down; starts running too fast; nine guys let go, but not the brave soldier on the end of the pipe, who gets launched. The classic version ends with the pipe slamming against the
grid, a pregnant pause, then a voice in the darkened loft saying, "It's okay -- just let in the 2nd Legs" -- he'd grabbed them on the way up.