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Next: 9.4 Lights & Wires Up: 9 Hanging everything Previous: 9.2 Bars

9.3 Mini-coffins

Now that you have the bars set up you need to put your power supplies up there so that the lights will have something to operate from. After deciding where you are going to put the 4 mini-coffins so that they are not in the way, and yet you can still manage short cable runs. Choose a place for the distribution box so that you have short main power runs out to the mini-coffins.

The power distribution box and the mini-coffins both hang from the bars from chains that you can loop over the bars multiple times. If you discover that you really need the distribution box out of the way you can hang one of the very very short bars above the main grid and thus raise it above everything else. In any case once you have all of these boxes up you need to wire them all into the power distribution box and then plug the power distribution box into the wall.

To wire everything together you will need a large Allen wrench and some time. The main power lines should have been left in the mini-coffins since otherwise they are pain and a half to install. You should loosely wrap the wires around the bars as you bring them over to the main power box. Bring the wires in through the tension relievers on the side of the box and sort them out into the bars that you will wire them into. One of the few things that Stagelight Inc. did wrong was not build the distribution box with enough copper bars in it. The one on the side of the box that you will use for the white neutral wires was originally intended to take grounding wires. Another improvement to the box for which I did not have the requisite funds was to install special colored copper terminals on the outside that would fit plugs that would go on the wires this would make installation tremendously easier. You can look into it if you want.

In any case, double check to make sure that everything is wired in tightly since this is the part of the system that could be quite spectacular if something is poorly wired. The first time it was put up the person wiring it accidentally left one of the black wires slightly loose. It popped out after box was closed and caused sparks to fly in the most amazing way. Fortunately none of the newly purchased stuff was damaged, much to my intense relief.

Now if everything is plugged in, throw the giant circuit breaker and all of the mini-coffins should come on with their green lights and you should put your hand up next to each of them to make sure that their fans are running and that cooling air is being drawn through them. Each wire actually runs two plugs on each mini-coffin, so if you notice that two plugs are not working it is probably due to power not being supplied for some reason from the main supply.

You should also install the control wires at this point so that you can test the lighting circuits after you put in the lights. Or you can wait to put in the control wires after you have put everything else in, it really doesn't matter all that much.



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Next: 9.4 Lights & Wires Up: 9 Hanging everything Previous: 9.2 Bars



Chris Martin<chris@physics.ucsb.edu>
Last Modifed: Mon Aug 14 1995