How Many Spares?
Wednesday, September 9, 2009 at 08:00AM
My friends over at Scharff Weisberg sent out some very interesting information about spare equipment. This is one of those areas where there are no rules, but where thinking through the situation is critical, since "the show must go on".
Here's the introduction to the email:
Somewhere between no spare equipment and a spare of every component lies the ideal spare equipment complement for each and every show. That ideal varies depending on the shop and/or the system designer as well as various factors related to the specific show such as location, schedule and prominence. In this month's E-mail, I'm going to break this down by type of equipment and provide a perspective that you may find valuable in assessing spare equipment requirements for your projects.
You can read the entire thing here.
Reader Comments (2)
This is a pet peeve of mine. As the technology advances, reliability seems to be getting worse. Once, I hardly ever had to send things back, and now it's a regular occurrence. Redundancy and spare components are ever-more essential, since everything out there seems to be mass-manufactured with minimal production costs as the primary objective as opposed to reliability. I'm tired of a) sending crap back in exchange for an identical piece of crap that's guaranteed to fail in exactly the same way just before going on stage or b) throwing said broken crap away and buying an even more expensive piece of crap. ...and you kids get off my lawn!
Frankly, I'd like to have a spare of everything when we go on stage, but we can't afford that. So John, the question is, what's in *your* spare part room? What do you consider mission-critical? Sure, the expendables are a given, such as lamps, gels, batteries, guitar strings. But, what do you expect to fail, and what unexpected failures have surprised you in the past? Heck, even a simple power adapter can suddenly be mission-critical if it pulls a Dell and melts just before a show.
We need more modularity, and less of the "No user-servicable parts inside." There's something to be said for cracking open an amp cabinet and replacing a 12AU7 tube as opposed to some monolithic VLSI board that needs to be sent to a specialty repair shop. Heck, a few months back, I repaired my brother's 1966 Telefunken hi-fi console with a strand of wire, a dab of glue, and a piece of string. Ahhh, the smell of hot tubes and dust...now excuse me, I need to go wind up the ol' Victrola.
I'd love to post my thoughts on this but I'm heading out of town and offline through Sunday...
Thanks!
John