South Ayrshire Council provided the project management. The Pilewind winches enables the Gaiety’s busy technical staff to raise, lower and position four of the stage lighting bars quickly, efficiently and safety. Before the Pilewind winches were installed, the Gaiety crew was reliant on old hand winches, and hauling ropes to position each lighting bar. This took considerable time and physical effort. PCM’s Pilewind winches, operating at a steady speed of 125mm per second, offer great flexibility, and are designed to raise and lower theatrical lanterns and stage props - ideal for the Gaiety’s many and varied productions. For full flexibility, PCM’s electrical team manufactured and installed the main power control panel and local isolators to each Pilewind winch. They also devised a local control system, allowing each winch to be operated from a fixed control panel on the fly floor, or a plug in pendant control on the stage.
PCM always puts safety first and this project was no exception. Each Pilewind unit is designed within slack line sensors, activated if one of the steel operating cables touch any object within the travel operation of the winch, in turn causing the motor unit to stop automatically. When the object is removed the sensors automatically reset allowing the Pilewind winch to re-commence safe operation.
The Pilewind winches also have the added advantage of overload sensors, activated when the applied load is greater than 500kg - with the Pilewind not commencing operation until part of the load is removed. Again, these automatically reset, so that the winch can re-commence safe operation. The winches each have standard up and down travel limits, and to further enhance safety, each is also fitted with additional over-travel limits. If one of the standard limits fails, this would prevent the suspension bar from striking the grid or stage floor.
The Pilewind winch control panels are also designed with safety to the fore. For the winch to be activated, both the plug in pendant and fly floor fixed control panels have to be enabled. By doing this, both of the ‘E’ stops are activated, so in an emergency the Pilewinds can be manually stopped either onstage, or at the fly floor. PCM’s electrical team also installed electrical interlocks, which prevent both control panels being used at the same time. Fully rated, wall-and-grid mounted, ball raced multi-grooved pulleys, quietly guide each of the 6mm steel core cables into a secure adjustable bar-clamp termination. This in turn is mounted onto a 300mm deep Aluminium fabricated ladder truss. A major challenge of this project was the positioning of the 180kg units, installed six metres above the stage floor. This element of the job entailed working around the fly floor, and the solution was to use one of PCM’s own specialist Silverline manual chain lifting blocks for easy and safe raising and positioning of each Pilewind winch.
The project also had to be completed in a tight time frame to minimize any disruptions to the Gaiety’s busy production schedule; PCM completed the task with a day to spare. The first show to utilise the new winches was ‘Dansarena’ a local dancing school production which used the theatre’s full lighting rig, much of which was on the new bars.
(Lee Baldock)
