Lights On Chelsea Hanging Mega Tree
The “twin peaks” mega trees in our display were designed differently than any of the other megas that I’ve seen or read about. I did a lot of digging through web sites and old posts on Planet Christmas, reading all I could about megas, and their care and feeding. All other megas that I’m aware of are built around a pole or post of some sort. From there, a bunn foot or other tree topper is attached, and the lights are hung from there. All well and good, and works fine (except under heavy wind or ice loads). Since my front yard is full of trees and bushes, I wasn’t anxious to dig a big hole for mounting a flag pole or other such post (lots of roots to dig through, and I didn’t want ugly footings in my front yard). I wanted to be able to make every last hint of the tree go away when the lighting season was over. Being the owner of a Hobie Cat catamaran, I knew a little about pulleys and rigging, and that lead me to thinking about using pulleys to raise the lights… but what would I use to support them? I decided that a using a 3/16” steel cable (the kind used to hold up the boats mast), supported on the ends by two of the oak trees would make a descent anchor point for the top of the trees. I ran the idea through the group at Planet Christmas for their thoughts. Their opinion was that it should work, but 3/16” might be a little small for the load that the wires would experience. Working for a large lodging/entertainment company, I had access to some of our full time stage riggers. I spoke to them about what I wanted to do. They too, said that it should work fine, but they recommended that I use ¼” cable. So the wheels were in motion. I enlisted the help of Nick Garofolo, one of the riggers (and a very brave man). He cheerfully gave me his time when it came time to rig the wires in the trees. For this I thank him. (Thanks Nick!) In a serendipitous coincidence, new regulations for stage rigging went into effect recently in NJ. The regs require that all rigging be rated, meaning that it is built to certain tolerances and is tested and certified to support certain static and dynamic loads. The wires that were installed on our stage were all older, and not rated. They were throwing out all of the old rigging and buying new. JACKPOT! Nick called me down to the stage one day while they were removing the old stuff. When I got there, there was a dumpster (about 3’x4’x2.5’) full to overflowing with cables and clamps and thimbles that they were throwing away – most of the stuff that I’d need to hang the mega trees. I spoke to the stage manager to explain what I was doing, and to verify that this stuff was all trash. He invited me to help myself. They even brought me a plastic bag to put the clamps and thimbles in. These guys are the best. (Thanks Ken!) When I walked out of there, I was barely able to carry all the goodies. I had coils and coils of ¼” wire, and a big bag full of hardware. (Darn, that stuff is HEAVY!) The only things that I had to buy for rigging the trees were a pair of becketted pulleys, some carabiners, and a pair of turnbuckles. I had a few other pulleys around that used to serve on my boat, and they went into the rigging too. So, here is a basic plan:
The "weighted floating wire" idea was used because I imagined the oak trees swaying in the wind, and I didn't want the megas bobbing and weaving with the oaks. I thought this idea would help keep the mega trees stabile. I am not convinced that this really prevented the trees from moving, but I'm not prepared to say that it didn't help, either. I will use the same setup next year. The weights I used had to counterbalance the weight of the tree and all its lights. Since it went through a pair of pulleys, I the counter weights only needed to be half the weight of the lights on the trees. The lights on each tree weighed about 100 lbs, so I used about 50 lbs on each counter weight. One of my employees donated two 25 lb free weights to the cause (Thank you Ray Watts!). Since I didn't have more weights to use, I improvised, using a 5 gallon bucket filled with river rocks from the landscaping in my front yard. Worked great!
Here's a shot of a tree suspended and ready to go. The base is about 18" above
the ground, and one of my bushes is actually encircled by the base of the tree.
This is the base of one of the trees. You may be able to see where I've wrapped it with white tape at the beginning, red tape
at the middle, and blue tape at the end of each slice of the tree. This facilitates easy attachment of the light strings.
This shows the attachment of the light strings to the base. You can see the beginning (white tape) of
segments 4 and 5. You can also see that during the course of the month, the tie-wraps
have slipped a few inches from their original attachment points (on the tapes).
When attaching the lights, I use tie-wraps to secure the plug end at the beginning of a slice. The lights
then go to the top, back to the base, then over a few inches along the base, up to the top, and then down to the base again.
Here, at the top, you can see a carabiner attached to the horizontal support wire. At the bottom of
this carabiner is the first pulley. Attached to the beckett of this pulley is the main halyard that runs down
to the top of the tree, through a pulley mounted there, back up and over the first pulley. From there (out of picture)
the halyard runs to a third pulley and then down to the ground where the counter weights are attached.
Here is one set of counterweights. They hung about 18" off the ground. You can see the
counterweights for the second tree in the top right of the picture. It's a 5 gallon bucket
that I painted dark green, filled with river rocks that I had around the house as landscaping.
Lights On Chelsea Mega Tree Stats:
Each tree is made up of 14,400 lights (144 strings of 100)
36 Strings of each of four colors of lights
48 channels (12 channels per color)
Three LOR 16 channel controllers dedicated to each tree
© Town Productions Inc. 2008