In smaller theatre departments like mine, keeping electrical cable organized is as tiresome as it is essential. The cables pulled down in haste during a strike are often tossed onto a jumbled pile in a corner until they can be collected in a laundry hamper and rolled out of the way just before the last sweep. During the next load-in, having to search for just the cable you need in the resulting spaghetti pile makes the work just that much harder.

LABELING

When I arrived at Antelope Valley College, I found a total of 54 cables measuring anywhere from 1′-0″ to 80′-0″. None were marked as to length, and they had no designated storage area. My first chore was to mark each one. Following the example of Master Electricians everywhere, my stagecraft students and I coded each cable with colored spike tape. In our system, a band of yellow tape indicates 25′-0″; red indicates 10′-0″; green, 5′-0″; and blue, 1′-0″. Some electricians suggest standardizing the cables’ length by cutting each cable down to the nearest 5 or 10 feet. At times I have considered doing so, but whenever I find that the last available cable is just barely long enough to reach the light being hung, I’m glad I’ve never cut any of them. Besides, with very little practice, even the newest students know that a cable marked YRGBBB is 25′+10′+5′+1′+1′+1′ or 43′-0″ long.

STORING

The next step was to create a storage area for the cable. Since our theatre is a black box with an overhead grid, it made sense in terms of storage and ease of access to build a rolling cart. I developed the design illustrated on the following page as a shop project for my beginning students, deliberately making the cart easy to build. I also made certain that it could be built from existing scrap material and that it would store tucked out of the way in any odd corner in our crowded space that happened to be available at the time. Labels and strips of colored spike tape on the shelves’ edges clearly indicate where the various cables should be stored.

The original cart has been in use for several years now with almost no modifications, and it certainly stores our cable more efficiently than a laundry hamper would.

FIGURE 1: ELECTRICAL CABLE STORAGE CART