For more pictures of the rigging upgrade at Skyline College, please click HERE

Skyline College Theater was equipped with a traditional “wrap around cyc” when I arrived there.  This made hanging full sized drops difficult as there were no full sized battens (forty-seven feet long) available upstage of the third and last electric where all of the cyc lights were hung.  As the majority of shows produced at skyline were dance specific, this would not do for long.  While touring the “Mexican Heritage Theater” in San Jose, I noticed that some of their battens were “slung”; spreading five pick-up points over a three-cable line-set.  After a trip to SF rigging supply and the steelworks next door, I was able to adapt the upstage line-sets after straightening the cyclorama.  Straightening the cyc required moving the two loft blocks that housed the outside line sets in the seven cable rigging (the cyclorama being the longest of the battens to reach the furthest upstage sight lines).  All connections were improved in strength after I finished the upgrade as I replaced the old style cable-clamps with brand new NIKO pressed ferrules and thimbles appropriate for the 1/4 inch steel rope and added batten shackles to replace the original 1969 method of simply “clove-hitching” the wire rope around the pipe before clamping it.  Because of the new height limitations due to the slung points, I had to add a new “Bumper Bar” that decreased the “out-dead” for the Arbors at the rail on deck.  This meant that loading those arbors would require an extra two feet of “stretching” but that was remedied with a small step stool in front of those three positions.  Since I limited those battens to only holding drops, this was not a problem as the arbor was never loaded too high.

For more pictures of the rigging upgrade at Skyline College, please click HERE