Gareth and I went out to Milwaukee last week for USITT 2013. It was a great conference and we had a good time catching up with our friends, meeting some customers in person and talking to new people. Gareth spoke at ‘Turntables On A Budget’ with Scott Bartlett. Scott gave a great talk about different construction techniques and materials choices if you’re tight on money and need a revolve. Gareth spoke about our products, how they integrate with revolves and how affordable they are, especially the rentals. It was also really cool to hear a lot of people talk about the Creative Conners system as the emerging “Industry Standard” for automation in live theatre. A big thanks to everyone who spreads the word!

All in all, a great time. See you all in Texas in 2014!

Andy Hammond at Axxis Inc. sent us another video, this one shows the integration of the Creative Conners Revolver with his 20 ft diameter turntable. Looks nice!

We got this great video from Andy Hammond at Axxis Inc. They purchased a Revolver system from us in December and rolled it out for this show. Nice work guys!

This year’s NCAA Tournament bracket has a lot of Creative Conners customers in it, so if you’re watching a game and don’t know who to root for, you can always go with the college that has awesome automation gear in their theatre!

Gareth and I will be attending USITT in Milwaukee later this week and Gareth will be a presenter at “Turntables on a Budget” Thursday at 1:00. If you’re going to be at USITT and want to meet up, drop me a line at ian@creativeconners.com. Always great to meet our customers face-to-face!

I promised to keep everyone updated on the progress of the drum manufacturing for our new Spotline hoist – here’s a short video of the grooves getting cut on our CNC Mill. The 4th axis spins the drum and the table moves the drum to cut the groove in a helix. Pretty neat, huh? Enjoy!

Here’s a quick video showing part of the drum cutting process for our new Spotline hoist. Royal has an 8″ piece of aluminum tubing chucked up on the Tormach CNC mill, and he’s using the 4th axis (the horizontal spinning) to cut slots for the spokes of the hub.

You’ll see more updates on the hoist development throughout March.

Last year we did a custom job for Cigar Box Studios for their window display at the Ted Baker store in Manhattan. We made 4 custom linear actuators that came out great and have been running non-stop for about 8 months. Yesterday we found this video of the shop test:

Our actuators handle the items that are traveling up and down. Here’s a video that we posted to YouTube last year showing the actuator being tested before going to New York:

These actuators are for sale, so let us know if you’re interested in getting a couple for your theatre!

Big news today!  Over the last week or so, Gareth has been putting together a sweet calculator for figuring out all of your gearing and capacities when designing machines. We’re calling it ‘Motor Calc’ and it just went live at http://motorcalc.creativeconners.com. Please check it out and let us know what you think.

Motor Calc works best in Webkit-enabled browsers like Chrome and Safari.

Here’s what 5 Revolver frames look like before they head off to powder-coating. There’s also some deck sheaves in there.