I’ve taken over as the only light technician on the ship, and several fixtures took the opportunity to see if I’m up to the task. A Cyberlight went completely out of control during a show, doing ballyhoos during blackouts and other mischievous things and would not shutdown from the console. The logic card had gone bad, and had to be replaced. Cybers are tanks, they are durable but a pain to fix when they do break. A million hexbolts later I get to the logic card and go to replace it, and the ship starts rocking; now a cyberlight weighs about 80 pounds so unless it’s absolutely necessary, I will work on them while they are still in the air. As I’m working, the Genie Lift is swaying back and forth so much that my flashlight can’t stay pointed at the fixture, it’s like I’m using a strobe light to see what I’m doing.

My rig has 30 some-odd color scrollers and every so often we change all the gel strings. In between, there’s the occasional scroller where the gel shrinks a little faster in the heat, or the sensor gets dirty and suddenly you have an orange in your blue wash. As a short term solution I put a piece of Gaffe on the gel where the sensor reads so that the sensor can see it.

This is and probably will be the most frustrating part of maintain the rig: we can only store so many spare parts, often when something breaks, we have to submit an order for a part and wait anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months to receive the parts. I’m used to being able to go out and buy whatever I needed, or get 2 day delivery. Case and point, I’ve had a VL2500 out of the rig for over a month because the connector for the magenta motor broke, so the whole wire harness has to be replaced, 3 weeks after

the request was made, I got a wire harness for a VL2500 Wash fixture, we use Spot fixtures (the difference being gobos and an iris) so it will be another couple weeks before we get the right part in.