CLE Internship part 4

so this week was an install at the new Gilbert high school just north of Ames. it should have only taken a day and a half for this install but do to complications, it took about 2 and a half. (we were only installing 2 scenery tracks)

Day one, first off, it would be nice if the project manager would have told the people on the crew that the main road into (and passing the high school) was completely closed. so everyone was late. it also would have been nice to know that the install was at the new high school that is currently under construction. so I spent about 20 minutes trying to get to the old high school. luckily, I left early anyways. so, once everyone finally got there, we started unloading the box truck. (mostly just tools and 10 pieces of track (each piece is about 20 feet long) ) so after we got all that inside, we ran into our first complication. the 2 scissor lifts we ordered weren't there yet; even worse the job site foreman (the one in charge of the entire building construction) told us that we couldn't drive them on the tile floor, or go around the building because they had the dirt outside the theatre loading dock exactly how they wanted it or some bullshit like that. so we couldn't even get our lifts where we needed them when they got there. so, we had to wait for the other crew that was there (the ones installing the rest of the "Fly system" luckily we still had to lay out points on the ground and cut cables first anyways. so we got the cables cut and nicro crimped. by the time we got that done, (there were 22 of them total) we finally had a usable lift. so we started hanging points. here is where the second complication comes in, everything in this theatre is dead hung. (nothing moves up or down. it stays exactly where it is all the time. (as in if you want to move a curtain you need a lift to get up to it) but apparently that's really common in most high school theatres) we were hanging our points straight on to the structural "I" beams. and our brackets fit on the "I" beams just fine, but when you tighten then down, they would clamp down on the rope wire cables, so we had to figure out a way to fix it. we didn't have what we needed to fix it se we decided to call it an early day and regroup the next day. 6 hours

Day 2: so we got a solution figured out for that last issue, and it worked pretty well. we didn't have any more issues with it. in fact, everything was going great until after lunch! we got all of the points hung, and we even got almost a full scenery track up before lunch! then we got back from lunch. the electrician crew had to steal one of our lifts so they could wire up the electrics, AND apparently some worker had fallen off the roof and broke his leg. (compound fracture with the bone trying to poke through the skin) (we saw the ambulance driving away when we got back) ya, poor bastard, but because of that, OSHA was supposedly called out to the site, so we all had to have hard hats (because it is a construction site any one caught without a hard hat could get themselves, and their company fined, and for every person without a hardhat, OSHA can shut down the entire job sight for "X" amount of days. )so the foreman was going around telling everybody without hard hats to leave the building. (and the asshole wasn't even wearing a hard hat himself) so only 2 people on the crew had hard hats because they always take their personal ones with them to work. so it wasn't a total loss, but the rest of us had to wait outside in the heat and humidity while a company employee went to the nearest hardware store to get us some hard hats. after that we got most of the track installed. 8 hours

Day 3: we still only had one lift, but we cut our crew down and only needed the one anyways. we put up the last section of track on the back one and got it bolted to the wall, the front one was a little more difficult. because they had a ladder going up to the cat walk, we had to figure out how to bolt the end of the track to something sturdy without interfering with the path way. so we cut about 2 feet off of the track and bolted it to  one of the 4x4 steel posts holding up the top landing of the catwalk ladder. (weirdest ladder I have ever seen. here is a pic of it.) except the one in the theatre was black. but that is the weirdest thing to walk up and down..... any way back to work, after we bolted that on, we had to put on the carriers. (the things that move the scenery pieces along the track) and we had to add the pull ropes on them as well. after we got those on, that was pretty much it. we just had to pack up and head out. 5 hours for a total of 72 hours of work.