Against the Ropes

Michael Martin from TrueNorth Church in North Augusta, SC brings us this great LED tape design.

Materials:

• LED Strip Lighting
• 15 decoder boxes
• 15 power supplies
• Cat5 cable
  Lumber
• Black paint
• Uni-strut
• U bolts

Techniques:

From Michael: One of the greatest challenges came from attempting to mount the LED tape to the structure. The adhesive that comes on the back of the tape is not strong enough to hold the tape over long runs. We found that clear zip ties worked the best in holding the strip to the wooden frame. When the LED strip is on, the zip ties are not visible.

We purchased our LED materials off of Amazon (made in Chine) to help keep the cost down. With this, there are some quirks. These boxes do not work well when chained with DMX. We found that running into the first box DMX and then chaining the remaining 14 boxes with Cat5 worked the best.

Our par cans were mounted from our back truss. We attached the 10’ sticks of uni-strut with U-bolts.

We heavily utilized Craigslist for this set. Before purchasing the 35 par cans for this set, we only owned 10 cans and they were all silver. Searching through Craigslist one day I ran across an ad selling all 35 of these matching par cans for $350. We jumped on these and now we have added 35 new fixtures to our inventory. Moral of the story, don’t be afraid to buy used! This is also a good example of purchasing with the mindset of thinking ahead. Since using them on this set, these same cans have been utilized in four other set designs.