Silver State Wire Rope & Rigging: Rotation resistant wire ropes are a series of steel ropes that were built specifically to not spin or rotate under a load. These ropes are designed to resist spinning by putting layers of wire rope spun in one direction, while the outer layers are spun in the opposite direction. The more layers there are, the less likely it will rotate.
3 comments:
This is yet another interesting article by Silver State Wire Rope and Rigging. Like I talked about last time, this is a really interesting company. For a company that doesn't do a ton of entertainment rigging, they do have a lot of good information and expertise about using wire rope for entertainment applications. The idea of having specific relation resistance wire rope is, while not super new to the industry, extremely useful and important to the industry. This is specifically important for performer flying and when flying scenic elements that can not turn. Silver State's biggest client, Cirque Du Soleil, I'm sure used this all the time. Between flying in scenic elements that can't turn to flying people, there must be a ton of this stuff everywhere. It would be interesting see if this type of stuff applies to synthetic ropes like Dynema which Cirque du Soleil uses on their shows with water like O.
As with all things theatrical, it is important to remember that often our industry is a very small offshoot of other industries, and this case is no different. I enjoy reading about the generalized construction operations and materials since they do play such a big role in our business, and it can give a lot more insight into why we do things a certain way. Here, with anti-rotational rope, the primary market is general construction rigging where you're constrained to one line. We in theatre have to deal with this far more often due to aesthetic choices reasons than practical reasons. One big takeaway from this article is how you cannot treat anti-rotation rope as you would normal wire rope due to the engineering behind it. We know that anti-rotation is going to be slightly weaker due to the internal stresses cause by the inner and outer strands pulling against each other. Additionally, proper termination and handling is important, which we unfortunately don't see all the time in a theatrical environment. I think it is important for entertainment riggers and technical directors to understand not only the application of rigging equipment to theatre, but the origins of how that equipment came to be in the construction industry.
This is certainly a clever product. The leading advantage seems to be with something that is only rigged with one strand of wire rope. If there is more than one connection point, they will keep each other static. So this would only be for something hanging loose, and connected by one pick line. It seems that the other advantage is that the counter-spun core and sheath mean that the line has more strength, which means a smaller line could be used to hold a heavier item, which could certainly be important. I’d be interested to know how much more this counter-spun wire rope costs compared to its normal counterpart. It says that shock-loading should also be avoided with this specific product (which is probably said about most rope anyway.) Of course, these manufacturers don’t have the entertainment industry in mind, but I’d be interested to hear about some ways that this is being applied in the field.
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