OOC # 39
Okay, the last night of rehearsals is done. I won't say everything is set in stone...I mean, we got the light-up sign for the other show four days after they opened...but since the lighting designer, choreographers, and director are all leaving town this weekend, things should be pretty stable for a while.
But this season is putting up a fight to the bitter end. One of our illusions has a bunch of DMX-controlled LED 'neon' on it...the DMX controllers are 12v units, I think? Or 24...either way, each one had its own power supply mounted on top of the illusion. Someone managed to crash the illusion into something overhead and totally demolished one of them, and bent up the case on the other pretty badly. The director had me get him the make and model information, and ordered a replacement for the dead one.
It got here a couple of days ago. And there has been constant talk about getting it installed...but tonight was kinda do-or-die time. So, while the lighting designer was going through and making some tweaks and finalizing the timing on his program, I got on a 12' tall ladder and started performing surgery...because the power supplies were mounted to a metal plate that I had to remove so I could get rid of the carcass of the destroyed supply and make room for the new one. And because literally nothing can be easy on any of these things, I had to have someone stand inside the illusion with a wrench to hold the nylon lock-nut while I turned the screws. Then I had to jockey the stupid plate around so I could get a screwdriver underneath it because they used more ny-locks when mounting the power supplies...
Got those loose, managed to get the functional one bent back into something vaguely resembling the right shape, put it back on the board, hooked up the wires to the other, when to put it on the board...and discovered that they have changed the dimensions on these things over the years, and the new one is both taller and longer than the one it's replacing (same width, though...), so none of the screw holes lined up right. Rather than agonize over trying to drill new holes, I cheated...gaff-taped the new supply to the back of the old one.
Then I went to power it all up...and only one of the controllers would power up at all, and that was only in a quick surge and then it would fade out. Unplugged them, disconnected power to the new power supply, plugged them back in, and the OTHER controller came on just fine. Figured maybe it was a bad controller, then, so I swapped which controller was hooked up to that power supply, figuring that if it didn't power up or it powered up weird, I'd have my culprit...as I'm in the process of this, the lighting designer decided they'd done everything they could, and rather than sit there and breathe down my neck, waiting for me to finish, they were gonna go back to their hotel room, get some sleep, and come in early tomorrow to finish making their tweaks specific to that item.
So, I plug it in...and rather than give me some weird display or surging power-up sequence like it was doing before, it fired right up. So, I hooked up the other controller to the new power supply, connected a power line to that one, and plugged it in again...both worked perfectly.
Now, I freely admit, I'm no electrician. I understand the barebones mechanics of its operating principles, I can rough-calculate the amperage load on a line, and sometimes I can even manage to troubleshoot some simple problems with a lot of trial and error and a multimeter. But I'm pretty sure that just swapping power supplies should NOT have solved whatever the problem was. But it did. Sometimes I hate lighting gear...
