Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Art Welter]

Thanks so much for the response. It occurred to me to find a local shop to do it and I have yet to look into that. It was so much easier back in the day to find local places that would make up ropes, hoses, etc. --Frank

Wish it would of occurred to me too- your post made me remember yet another set of tools (18" swage tool & 30" wire rope cutter) I have not used in far too long that will be going, going, gone...

[Doug Johnson]

Rigging.com sells a large assortment of pre-made rated cable slings.
 rigging.com/overhead-lifting

[Frank Koenig]

Thank you all for the many responses. Lots of great information, which I hope might be useful to others, too.

The project, definitely a one-off/prototype, is a speaker stand to fill the gap between the typical tripod stand (speaker-on-a-stick) and larger towers or lifts, such as Genie, Trabes, etc. Requirements include ~9 ft boom height (usable with a 10 ft ceiling), 150 lb working load, easily transportable and erectable by one person, and the ability to snatch the speaker off a dolly on the ground so that no lifting is needed. The design I'm working on resembles a scaled-down version of the Trabes 4.5 m tower and is entirely bolted together from aluminum tubing and channel with only a few machined parts and no welds. It looks like it might weigh ~70 lbs. So far it's just a design study and I have no idea how far I want to take it.

It will need some sort of winch. The rigging world favors wire rope, while I'd really like to use nylon or another polymer webbing, which is lighter and so much easier to handle. At this point I'm exploring possibilities and uncovering gotchas.

I'm well aware of the liability concerns of taking such product to market, or even just out in the wild. The extreme litigiousness here in the States is likely why the selection of speaker supports is as thin as it is, and there appears to be nothing to fill what might a be a fairly widespread need. So it goes.

--Frank

[Nathan Riddle]

For a reasonably priced swager with cutter & gauge this is what I got.

618-HSC-600
https://www.riggingwarehouse.com/default.aspx?page=item+detail&itemcode=618-HSC-600&catlist=2481

[Stephen Kirby]

Some years ago, I made up similar towers for a system I'd built.  Two rectangular box section extrusions.  I actually found it easier to repurpose rollers made for boat trailers.  I also used a boat trailer winch with 2" webbing as the lifting mechanism.  All these parts are designed to handle 2000lb + boats.  I've torn them down and scrapped the stuff as I scrapped the speakers I'd built and couldn't see the need to hang anything 10-12' up.  If you had some lightweight compact line array things (ignoring all the issues with such a rig) you were going to hand 4 high or something, that would be the ticket but it would probably need to be stouter due to the weight of 4+ individual boxes.  The DIYs I had was composed of two fairly light boxes.  One straight box with three neo 8s and a column of planar HFs, which I used on a stick for small venues.  And a "downfill" box with two angles that hung from the bottom of the straight box with two more 8s and HF's following the angles.  1/2" mahogany ply and both together were less than 100 lbs.  The stands themselves were probably good for something like 1000lbs, with all the bits good for more than 2000lbs.

But then you have to get back to whether you want to hang 4-6 dual 6 boxes instead of a single SM80 or Noesis on a stick.  With DuraTruss 5200 crank stands and BT-12 tilters, I can get a pair of DSRs up and pointed down at a crowd of several hundred just fine, in less time, and no liability for DIY.

[Frank Koenig]

Some years ago, I made up similar towers for a system I'd built.  Two rectangular box section extrusions.  I actually found it easier to repurpose rollers made for boat trailers.  I also used a boat trailer winch with 2" webbing as the lifting mechanism.  All these parts are designed to handle 2000lb + boats.  I've torn them down and scrapped the stuff...

Stephen,

Very interesting. It looks like I'm following in your footsteps -- maybe all the way to scrapping these things eventually. To be clear, I'm not interested in "mini line arrays". These stands would be for point-source speakers that are a little too heavy or awkward to tilt up onto a tripod. I see these stands as a replacement for heavy-duty tripods with similar weight and transportability, greater stability when erected, and no direct lifting of the speaker. We'll see.

I did find a "lifting" winch with an automatic brake and a 2 in. wide spool that is suitable for both wire rope and webbing. What I've not been able to find, surprisingly, are 2 in. wide flanged pulleys for webbing. I could machine my own but I'm not really looking for another lathe project. I could use 2" wide rollers and have the webbing slide between fixed guides. Or I could use narrower webbing for which conveyor belt idler pulleys would work well, but then I'd have to modify the winch spool, which is unappetizing. Wire rope makes all this go away. I just hate the way you have to struggle with wire rope each time to get a proper lay started on the spool. Maybe there are some winches with better rope control. I have come-alongs that use a steel clip inside the spool to tame the rope. Something like that... Fun and games.

--Frank

[ProSoundWeb Community]