CLE Internship part 3

so the last thing I did was tearing out the old fly system at Dowling high school. this week was the install for the new one. we put in 5 new line sets. Day 1 was mostly a lot of finishing what didn't get done at the first part of the install. ( I wasn't there for that part but they put in 3 electrics on a wench system and installed most of the head blocks and loft blocks) what we still had to do was cut, and run, all of the wire rope through all of those head blocks and loft blocks. we got most of the lines run on the first day, and we got the first two arbors up and tied off.

day two we put up some mule blocks. this is what they look like for the most part and we have some in fisher.  they are for when the baton can't line up with the arbor so you send the lines from the arbor to  the mule block then around to the baton. the way the rigging engineer designed it was so that the lines ran from the arbor to a mule block, all the way across the stage through some idlers (pulleys designed just to keep the lines from sagging so much) back around two more mule blocks to make a 90 degree turn and  set them about five feet behind where they run the first time. then we ran those to their loft blocks. after that we were finished running the lines so we then went up and put up some wire rope guide wires for the arbors. (we only had the two arbors up at this point because we discovered that it would be easier to run the guide wires before we took them up to the grid) so the head blocks we have are a little different then the ones in this picture.the ones we use actually have a special bolt with a sleeve over it to attach the guide lines to. but there are so many pins holding the loft block together we actually had to pry the sleeve out of the blocks to get the guide wire eyes on to them.

day three we had all the cable strung, blocks in place, and everything else was about where it needed to be. we finished placing the arbors, and got the rope wire lines attached to the arbors, and we crimped collars onto the wire ropes to make an eye so we could attach a chain to hold the baton. when we actually got batons up we had to go along with a laser distance finder to make sure that the pipe was about the same distance from the floor at every point it was attached to a wire rope. as we were going along we discovered that the person crimping the collars had actually missed 3 of them. we discovered this when one of the wire ropes in the middle of a baton slipped out of the crimp when we were trying to level out the pipe. because of his little screw up we got held up. but not really complaining because i got 2 extra hours out of it. after that we just had to weight the arbors and put the drops back up. 26 hours from this gig.