Just like taking care of your car & your own health. Taking care of the health of our equipment is paramount to ensuring the reliability of a show. Tho nothing lasts forever regular maintenance certainly extends the life of any equipment.
Today’s Music Hall Maintenance Day, we are replacing a cabinet from our DAS audio line array. With the newer technology, our system notifies the engineer if there is a problem or if the system notices a performance issue.
In this case, we were notified before it turned into a problem. Because the system is modular the suspect cabinet can be switched out in less than 30 minutes.
Now turning to the lighting part of the Music Hall Maintenance Day, we will be cleaning all the Air filters of our Martin Viper moving head lights. These large lights have an internal cooling system that keeps the lamps and all internal components at the correct operating temperature. Optimal air flow is key.
Martin makes supper serviceable light fixtures with a minimal amount of screws. We start by taking off the outer cover, held on with 2 screws on each side of the main head. The filters are held in with an additional 2 screws. All filters that have low hours and look fairly healthy we vacuum out. More severe dirty filters are replaced with new filters. Some filters that are made from a fabric material may be washed for later maintenance.
We then clean all the internal glass elements with glass cleaner and a lint-free cloth. There are over a dozen glass elements with numerous moving components that are inspected and lubricated if needed.
Our Chauvet Q Wash 419z, does not have filters but does have fans and lenses that we clean with compressed air and glass cleaner. They also have much fewer moving parts to inspect than the Vipers
