Doughty dealers Chinnick Theatre Services experienced a ‘light bulb moment’ when they first saw Doughty’s new Studio Rail Articulated Carriage at PLASA, London, realising it was the perfect piece of kit for a job they were working on at Richard Hewish College in Taunton.
“We were approached by Halsall Construction in Bath and asked if we could quote for a lighting grid at the college,” explained Clive Chinnick, “We were sent a photo of the internally wired theatre grid that had been in place previously. However it was in a classroom setting which made very little sense to us. Then we were sent through the specifications for the project, and one of the requests was for a socket to be placed every 200mm. We realised we needed to visit the college to try and better understand their needs.”
On visiting the college, Clive discovered that the project had nothing to do with drama as he was assuming. Instead the lighting grid was required in an art block. The client wanted some frames from which students could hang their pieces of artwork with some lighting points, in a gallery style. The 8ft by 4ft frames would be fitted with panels and a hinged top that could be lifted, allowing the students to pin their artwork on the boards or to hang them on the grid and then position them. However they wanted to achieve this on either side of a walkway with the option of being able to push the panels completely out of the way.
A couple of weeks later, Clive attended PLASA and stopped by the Doughty stand where he was captivated by the new Articulate Carriage that was running around the periphery of the stand. “I had a good chat with Dan Phillips, Doughty’s project sales co-ordinator about how nifty this new piece of kit was. Having already identified Studio Rail as the means to hang the frames, this carriage could not only go around corners, it had an excellent brake on it and a higher weight loading – much better than the standard 6 wheel carrier in this application.”
Clive continued: “Immediately I said to Dan “I want those”, to which Dan responded “We’ve only just launched them”. Dan said he could probably get us the 16 that we needed and he was good to his word. The frames went in on the 12th October and the entire system worked brilliantly first time. We’re really proud of this project and of course our client and the staff and students at the college are excited to have such a flexible gallery space for their course work.”
