I do production rigging and want to assure any would be concert goers that this is still a minority horror story as far as ive seen. The video walls i see fall most often are ground based because people will either not weight the bases of them or they will remove weight too early.
Shit happens but the typical standard is to rate motors for 3-5x less than what they can atually take.
Either way, the danger is usually to the crew, not the patrons. That said, there are literally tons of equipment suspended overhead most concerts. Do with that info as you will.
Yeah, standard safety factor in my area is 7:1. So if you expect 1 ton of load, you actually rate your rig for 7 tons. But that safety factor is mostly to account for things like shock loads, where gear “weighs” more when it bounces. So like if all of your motors stop moving at the same time and the rig bounces slightly, it will temporarily put more weight on the motors than the static load normally would. So if you hang 1 ton on a motor that is rated to fail at 1.5 tons, you can easily cause a failure when the load bounces.
The safety factor also helps add a buffer for things like one motor being slightly more loaded than the rest. Even a small discrepancy can cause huge weight differences where one motor is holding a lot more weight than the rest. The 7:1 factor helps buffer that, where the motor won’t fail just because it’s slightly higher than the rest.
I do production rigging and want to assure any would be concert goers that this is still a minority horror story as far as ive seen. The video walls i see fall most often are ground based because people will either not weight the bases of them or they will remove weight too early.
Shit happens but the typical standard is to rate motors for 3-5x less than what they can atually take.
Either way, the danger is usually to the crew, not the patrons. That said, there are literally tons of equipment suspended overhead most concerts. Do with that info as you will.
Yeah, standard safety factor in my area is 7:1. So if you expect 1 ton of load, you actually rate your rig for 7 tons. But that safety factor is mostly to account for things like shock loads, where gear “weighs” more when it bounces. So like if all of your motors stop moving at the same time and the rig bounces slightly, it will temporarily put more weight on the motors than the static load normally would. So if you hang 1 ton on a motor that is rated to fail at 1.5 tons, you can easily cause a failure when the load bounces.
The safety factor also helps add a buffer for things like one motor being slightly more loaded than the rest. Even a small discrepancy can cause huge weight differences where one motor is holding a lot more weight than the rest. The 7:1 factor helps buffer that, where the motor won’t fail just because it’s slightly higher than the rest.
If youre pushing that close to your limit with a bounce you really need to reevaluate your rig lmao