Baku Libra Stage and Chandelier
Libra Stage
We were awarded the contract to design, manufacture, build, install, maintain and dismantle the Libra stage which in essence is a huge set of old fashioned weighing scales. This was required as part of the opening ceremony for the Baku European Games.
The construction was 16 metre tall consisting of 2 weight discs 4 metres in diameter set 10 metres apart on top of a beam.
Upon these discs there was a person dancing one female and one male who incidentally had to weigh the same so as not to unbalance the scales.
The finish of the discs was one in gold leaf and the other in silver leaf. Each leaf is 140mm square resulting in approximately 1,500 leafs per disc individually laid to an exacting grid specification. These were protected with a special top coating to reduce the amount of damage from the dancers.
The whole structure was suspended from a central hub which was required to rotate on plan controlled from a wireless DMX system which had to work all the way to the centre of the field of play. We had to ensure that the wireless signal was strong enough and the frequency used was free of any other traffic which could have caused communications issues.
A top beam was part of the design brief required to house the discrete fall arrest hardware.
We trial built the Libra stage at Millennium Studios on Thurleigh aerodrome and our client attended to start practice rehearsal as part of the factory acceptance test process required by the client.
A pair of truss based ground support dollies was also part of the contract to allow the assembled Libra stage to be taken off the catenary wire system in the venue at either end
The attention to detail required for this project was extremely time consuming but the results, I’m sure you will agree, were spectacular
Chandelier
We won the contract to design, manufacture, build, install, maintain and dismantle the Chandelier for the closing ceremony of the games. The brief was a discrete structure to support 260 Chinese lanterns each with their own battery powered light inside.
The sphere was 8.5 metres in diameter consisting of 9 rings each with droppers for the Chinese lanterns. Each ring was joined together with 6 or 8 spokes and the whole structure flown from 2 bridled points.
From an engineering point of view this was a complex structure due to the mis-noding of the spokes which caused localised high stress points and made the transfer of loads to the bridled points a less than straightforward process to calculate.
We built the structure from a crane in our workshop yard discovering how out of shape this sphere was until we fitted the last piece of the structure together which was a bit of a worry at the time.
A pair of truss based ground support dollies was also part of the contract to allow the assembled Libra stage to be taken off the catenary wire system in the venue at the storage area and on the field of play.
We decided to extend the stay of our man on site to cover both contracts which dovetailed into each other perfectly. James did a great job representing us on site.
