A Summer of Steel Wire Ropes...

For many people summer  means long hot days, relaxing in the garden or on a beach somewhere glamorous, like Filey. For the hardworking and handsome members of the Technical Stage Management team it means dirty sweaty days, inspecting and testing our lifting equipment, organising and repairing our masking flats, and this year, preparing our equipment for the move out of the building.

The inspection and testing of our lifting equipment is something that we do every six months, during the summer, and again after Pantomime. It involves the inspection of every moving part of our counterweight flying system, checking for any imperfections in the steel wires that hold the lighting and scenery over our heads for the rest of the year. Just to throw some numbers at you, the inspection of the flying system involves the individual checking of:

·         750 metres of Fibre Ropes

·         3km of  Steel Wire Ropes

·         20 cups of coffee (6.5 litres I reckon)

·         214 Pulley

·         And over 1000 separate nuts and bolts

The Counterweight Flying System

The grid space where we spend some of our summer

All this before we get to the separate rigging steels, slings, and fixings that we use to fly scenery and lighting. After many years of practice it still takes two of us 40 hours, not including brew breaks, to check all our equipment to comply with LOLER (Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations).

This is also the time we get to make any necessary repairs to our black masking flats, often the only decent repair we can make is to re-cover the whole thing with new material. This is something we need to do every few years and it’s a job that takes up the whole stage, which is why we have to do it during our ‘Dark’ period.

So next time you see that there are no shows on at the Coliseum for a few weeks, remember that the Technical Stage boys are still working as hard as they do when there is a production on, unless of course we are on holiday. In Filey.

- Technical Stage Management Team