"Oppie" wrote in message
...
I have fond memories of high school stage crew, running the Variac dimmer
board.

Our control panel had a bunch of rheostats that fed DC (?) control voltages to
a large "dimmer rack" (which was in an adjacenet room with good-sized concrete
walls... there was probably the potential for 50kW flowing through that
room...). The dimmer rack had these slide-in dimmers (in two sizes... most
were something like 1kW, and some double-size units were either 2 or 4kW),
which in retrospect I figure were TRIAC-based, performing phase-angle control.

For curtains, etc., we had "carriages" that traveled up and down a pair of
rails, and you stacked standard weights onto the carriage to create the
appropriate counterbalance (the weights were either the same or very similar
to the ones you see on exercise weight machines) - no sand bags.

It's probably been converted to DMX as well by now. (Ironically, Electronic
Theatre Controls was only a few miles away from the school -- I went dumpster
diving there a couple of times. Too bad they went out of business...)