Yesterday was the ever exciting Wednesday meeting.  We all rushed through it in hopes of getting to the more substantial notes review of the ETC Submital

The phone in the middle of the table became super important at 9:40 when we were able to have a conversation with Eric, The project manager for ETC's part of the great install.  It was a long phone call but in the end some important things were realized without the long delay of questions submitted via notes that then are responded to via alternate notes that only beg to ask more questions that then leaves us in August and....  Well luckily it didn't happen that way so hopefully on Monday we will have approved the entire ETC package.  Except the lux part that seems to still be floating around and is hopefully getting strong armed as we speak right now through Wesco. 

Oh and well another official moment the lines running from the stage managers panel are being pulled out.  Hopefully all of the friction will not stop them from getting all this stuff out.

Here is a nice view of the stage today from the back of the balcony sure is pretty
Here is what happens when you complain about your phone not working.  CnC brings you the super fancy digital phone.  Now Matt has the coooooool phone but at least his desk is smaller and it still isn't fixed
Upstairs our hole for dropping lights was still uncovered and they put the plastic over it and wrote with super bright sharpies that you could hardly see that there was a hole here.
So i put the cover back in:  Now you see it now you don't

Cement walls

Here we are looking at the cement wall where the patch panel once was.  This is good we are going to need storage space for our new choral risers and our new platforms that are coming.  Looks like it 8' x 4 ' just enough space for our special cart to sit.

And here is another cement wall.  This was the company switch.  So Kris now the question still remains how are they going to elongate that feeder?....
Oh for all of you to get some perspective.  There is not gigantic cabinet upstage and that image of the cement wall was actually taken USR.  That's right things are a changin'
Look at that nice fine copper.
And last but not least it is official the wireway on the seconed electric will not be shocking the overhire and the uninitiated any longer.  We will have to find something else to do to the inititiates.  Maybe we will start using the twist lock connectors on the monitor speakers.  (yes i know that it is locked but is it locked open or closed)  

Pit Controller works fine

I don't know why but after all that the pit controller works fine throught the Stage Right wall receptacle.  So that is good and all we have to do is cap that off and say that the drawings were right and the added stuff just made it confusing without changing the original.

Pit Lift Controller

For all those interested in this question.  The drawing indicates that the 1" conduit from the controller box under the pit goes directly to he wall mounted receptacle on Stage Right.  The conduit holding the control lines down there also turns in that direction as it goes into the concrete slab.  Now i am wondering if the power line #22 just doesn't work there and it has been that way for some time.  My feeling is that the control lines from the pit go to the recptacle stage right and then continues to SMP 01 then over to SMP 02.  But since the power wasn't working when they added the two extra receptacles they decided to just pull the power from the Main Curtain controller

Maybe.  But here is the drawing indicating the conduit run to SR

Oh thats why it wouldn't work

the picture below shows the extensive carbon and burn marks left inside the channels.  Especially in this segment that was near the non dims track

Just interesting to see the background exposed.   Jeff the Electrician sub foreman who has been working all week to strip this panel said that many of the breakers he was pulling out were not screwed in anymore but were mostly just sitting there via friction.  I guess in some sense we could say that we were lucky.

Full view of the emptying cabinet

the burn marks and the oxidation are everywhere.

dimmer room is almost empty

The dimmer room is close,  Anyone need a paperweight??

The crying room is filling up with copper
The the empty spaces.  This whole rack is welded into place and took all afternoon to slowly cut it all apart.  But as one the electricians who was tasked with doing all the cutting said.  It survived serveral earthquakes.  Can't really argue with that.  The amount of weight tha didn't move is definately a testiment to the strength of it all.
Um yeah this is a gigantic transformer revealed after 40 years
oh and it is the only thing left of the dimmer rack at the end of this day

yesterday the camera broke

&uot

Yesterday the camera fell to the ground.  It was what seemed a rather insignificant event until the end to the day when i was writing this blog and uploading my pictures.  The images from the end of yesterday, as you can see from the blog are all out of focus and very bad images.  I inspected the camera and could see that the decorative plastic ring that went around the lens had dented.  This made me feel that the warranty was useless since it was from some sort of impact that the problems were created.  One could argue that a point and shoot camera that can't survive a fall to the floor from 5 feet up is a design flaw but i don't think the warrarnty cares much for that argument.

so the problem.

In the investigation as to what could have happened to the camera it became most apparent when you zoomed forward and the image was filled with this curve.  So either the lens or the sensor was knocked out of place.  The retracting of the lens when turned on and off was still working fine.  It opened and closed without an apparent problem no weird sounds that might indicate that the motor was working harder so that made me think that maybe the sensor had been knocked out of alignment.

Here is an image from when i was trying to figure out that something was wrong with the camera.

[ so cleary the images are messed up and i can't seem to move this one down to the bottome but this image is the comparison to the one at the bottome.  This image is after i put the camera back together]

So on realizing that if i wanted to use the camera i was going to have to fix it myself since the warrenty wouldn't apply and insurance was not implemented.  (I only got the camera two weeks ago).

So started to take the camera apart hoping i could find the thing that was out of alignment.  As it came apart it, of course got more and more complicated and my system for keeping track of the tiny screws quickly deterioted into a lot of tiny screws sitting on my desk.  So like the lighting project i was at a point of no return.  It seemed like i was heading towards nothing working.  By the end of the day i had figured out the sensor situation and that was not the problem so i had to go back to the lens but no adjustment to that part seemed to do anything.  So i needed to get past the sensor to the lens that sits right in front of the sensor.  The great thing about this small camera is that since it is so small the sensor has to move to the left when the camera compacts to its off position.  That means springs and more motors to move peices of plastic.  I had to get passed this moving plastic frame that held the senor to see into the lens mechanism.  More small screws were on the table.  There was some sort of glass peice that was between the sensor and the lens so i tried to grab this out but instead it fell out of site into the open lens area.  Nice!  So that was the end of that.  Turning the thing upside down didn't do anything to get this glass thing out.  So i left for the day thinking that the blog was over.............................................

Today i took out more screws and was able to see the lens that was on this side and the glass that had fallen in.   emptied out all the parts and then powere the camera back up to close the lens again.  The lens that was on this side seemed wonky so i tried to adjust it to see it anything would happen.  Somthing happened but i couldn't tell what.  So i thought when i have a chance i will try and close this thing back up.

Eventually after giveg up hope i closed the thing and i am left with five screws.  But then i turned it on  here is the picture i got......

So somehow after taking this thing apart i managed to get it back to together.  Beyond all odds.  Even Matt thought it was a lost cause and the camera was useless.  I wish i had a picture of the desk with this thing splayed out but alas the innards made it hard to use the sensor.

so again here was yesterday

 So back to taking pictures and doing the blog

Updating today, tomorrow aggresion will be had all invited

Dimmer room continues to spill it's guts out.  There are a lot of hex nuts to deal with.

look what we have on the dock, maybe i can get my license renewed?  I know that i have something big that i need to move.  

oh the glorious wires to nowhere.  I think that tomorrow there could be some sledge hammers swinging to pay back the oxidized internal circuits of this long dead circuit patch panel

Oh and the front of house pass through is finished as well spilling it's wire as well.
Today was not quite as exciting as other days but that is okay.  Soon there will be so many cues

now there is just the little 7 volt problem

So this button stilled had 7 volts coming to it.  At least now we can go back to what we thought that last one was and re think about this 24 volt bell audience call button.  So in looking at the drawings again we realized that this system just had to be getting it's power from front of house.  So back to panel G2, but where is the transformer?  After searching through all the rooms on both sides of  this room suddenly we were noticing the floor instead of the  higher wall and one of noticed the transformer  sticker here in the cement surrounded by the front of house CnC stuff.  Eureka finally something is starting to make sense.  But still in the panel there is no marking for a circuit that would be going to this transformer.  So where is it getting its power.
In looking at the transformer we realize that the only way that we could have a 24 volt system  through this transformer it means that we have to have 240 input.  Seems crazy so we look into the panels on our left to see if any of the breakers are ganged together.  There isn't,  so that makes for more interesting investigation.  Things are confusing again where are we getting 240 from?
So in pulling off the box covers we noticed that the conduit hole in the back box was going into the wall not to the right where the panes were located.  so how do we follow that.  We count out our steps and go into the lower lobby and count out the steps again and the only thing in this area was this G2- 08 double gang.  So we decided to pull off the the cover plate to see if this was a pass through for the power.  Low and behold it is and we can see the light in other room where the transformer box are still uncovered.

But it seems the power is not passing through but ganged together with the outlet
Weird,  So back to the transformer on the other side of the wall.  IF we meter it and start turning off all the things that have 240 maybe it will turn off.  Nope, but the outlet we have been looking through is labeled 8 so lets turn off 8.  There it is, half of our 240 is coming off of the 8 breaker.  Now we have to find the other leg.  Lets try the next breaker down 10.  Yep there it is if 8 and 10 are on then the transformer has full power of 24 volts.  both 8 and 10 have no indication that they may be ganged together or that they may be powering the audience call system.  But now we have found it and the SMP has been tested to have no more errant voltage.  

That was fun

120 volts still in Stage Manger Panel

So this is the amazing SMP (stage manager panel).  This one is actually the #1 panel there is a sub panel on SL but it doesn't have all of the buttons.  So the goals was to make sure no more voltage was running through any of these wires.   An interesting task considering rats nest that is in here.  Ryan spent most of the day after the meetings trying to run down the circuits and the breakers that would turn off the errant voltage.  At around 3 pm i joined him on the last two errant voltages.  A 7 volt that was going to the audience call bells in front of house and then the 120 volts that were still coming to the third terminal strip that you can see mounted in the back.

So Ryan started by following a false lead about the transformer to the left of the panel that was supposedly was maybe going to the bell system.  it made sense since the only things with voltage in the panel was the terminal 22 and the bell system  button.  Ryan tried to follow the original electric plans that seemed to describe the 24 volt bell system but there was no Panel that made sense that indicated power for the bell system (we will get back to this later because it is scary as to why there was no indication on the breaker panels).  So Ryan was our front flipping breakers on the G2 Panel in the Rug Storage Closet.  As he was flipping the breakers i was out front and i was looking at the rats nest trying to figure out what hole the terminal leads were going to.  It was pretty impossible actually.  But did notice that the Transformer cables were not touching anything in this panel and the color of the cable was different from what was assumed because the cable was actually brown instead of the proposed Blue.

So after flipping all the breakers in G2 panel and none of them cut our power Ryan came back and we started pulling more cables and trying to see which conduit our grey wire was going into.  It seemed to be going into a conduit that crossed the stage.  During this time Ryan discovered the terminal switches had a label that had fallen out of the way so held it back up and discovered that it was labeled PL 22.  

What is PL 22?  Our first thought was Plaster line.  But what could that be.  the outlets on the lip of the stage?  No but then we headed over to the other sub SMP and that one had a lot less cables.  The brown 22 cable was easier to follow and on of the leads ended on the other side of this connector installed in the bottom of the box.  So suddenly PL became Pit Lift.  Only a we always called it the pit elevator so the L didn't make sense until we found it terminating in this connector

So now back to the drawing to try and follow the Pit Lift lines.  Now it gets interesting turning off what seems like the pit lift controller under the lift doesn't make us loose the power in the SMP box.  So where is the Pit Controller getting its power.  Ryan goes on a hunch to room 59 L (Dougs old office) where there is a panel that used to have the power for the main curtains motor power and controller power.  By flipping off the breaker for the Main Curtain Controller (which was no longer used since we don't have that motor or those buttons in the SMP any more) it turned off the terminal.  So there it is...the power to the controller had been routed through the now defunct main curtain controller.

Success

try following these drawings

dimmer room

This is the end of the dimmer room.  It will be soon christened the Kris Shaw Dimmer room.  Take note the amount of empty space in this room.  When we return in 12 weeks this picture from the doorway will be quite different.

I just happened to love looking that the old technology and here is a picture of the inside of the patch panel.  The box upstage that held this thing could have been someones home.    
As you may or may not know this picture is where we see the fact that the patch panel has been quickly disconnected and the cables that connect them to the dimmer room have been cut and pulled out.  This means that the next time we turn on stage lights it will be from a new set of dimmers
I like this image of the poor obsolete quad boxes as they lay on the floor soon to see their demise to the giant cable cutter
Not only was the second electric finally cleared of its little floating and biting electrical current that liked to attach itself to the human body when we were hanging the electric and we actually had the breakers off, but now the asbestos covered cables have been pulled out.