30 SvoPatts, Three Trusses, One Truck: Packing the Bleachers Rig

Bleachers are out on the Everyone for Ten Minutes tour, and the lighting rig has a detail I couldn't stop thinking about. Tobias Rylander specified 30 Robe SvoPatt fixtures, supplied by Volt Lites out of Burbank, and rigged them on three over-stage trusses, 10 fixtures per truss, with every second one hung upside down so the modules line up into rows. It looks great. My first thought was still: what does that look like on the truck? So I did the math, and I'll flag which numbers are spec and which are my guess.

What a SvoPatt actually is on paper

Robe's spec sheet gives the SvoPatt at 545 mm (21.5 in) tall and 1,162 mm (45.7 in) wide with the yoke, 216 mm (8.5 in) deep, and 39.7 kg (87.5 lb). It also runs off a separate SvoPatt Driver that weighs 8.9 kg (19.6 lb) and has its own omega bracket. I'm assuming one driver per fixture here, so 30 drivers. If Volt runs them differently, that part of the number moves.

Robe lists two cases for it, a Single Top Loader Case (10120358-01) and a Dual Top Loader Case (10120360-01), but doesn't publish dimensions or weight for either one on the product page. Same gap we hit building the library. As I wrote in 21 New Brands in the Case Library (And the Rows We Left Out), we dropped bare fixtures on purpose, and Robe publishes top loader sizes but not shell weights, so those rows carry an implied weight. The SvoPatt cases aren't in there yet because there's no published size to start from.

Estimating the case

For a sense of how Robe builds a dual, their Dual Top Loader Case for the PATT 2017 is 7 mm plywood with ball corners and castors, and measures 1,200 x 600 x 1,050 mm (47.2 x 23.6 x 41.3 in). The SvoPatt is a much thinner fixture, so here's my estimate for its dual:

• Length: 45.7 in fixture plus walls and foam, call it 49 in
• Width: two 8.5 in fixtures plus foam and dividers, call it 24 in
• Height: 21.5 in fixture plus foam, lid and castors, call it 30 in
• Shell weight: a guess of 80 lb, since Robe doesn't publish shell weights

That puts a loaded dual at 2 x 87.5 + 80 = 255 lb. Thirty fixtures means 15 dual cases, and 15 x 255 = 3,825 lb. Only 2,625 lb of that is published fixture weight. The other 1,200 lb is my shell guess, so treat it that way.

Case rows and floor feet

A 53-foot dry van gives you about 52 ft 6 in of length, 98 to 100 in of width and 108 to 110 in of height. Two 49 in cases side by side is 98 in, which fits with nothing to spare. If the real case comes in at 50 in, turn it and run four across on the 24 in side instead (96 in).

Stacked two high, a 30 in case uses 60 in of the ceiling, so each row holds four cases. That's 15 cases in 4 rows, 4 x 24 in = 96 in, or about 8 ft of floor. Unstacked, it's 8 rows and about 16 ft.

The 30 drivers come to 30 x 19.6 = 588 lb bare. Robe doesn't publish driver dimensions on the spec sheet, so I'm budgeting two trunks with jumpers at roughly 700 lb and 2 ft of floor.

The truss

The PLSN piece doesn't name the truss, so I'm assuming 20.5 in box. Ten fixtures at 45.7 in each is 457 in, about 38 ft, so figure each truss at 40 ft, four 10 ft sticks. Three trusses is 12 sticks. The TOMCAT Medium Duty 20.5 x 20.5 plated section (TC 2020-120B) is 120 in long and 92 lb, so 12 x 92 = 1,104 lb.

Laid lengthwise, four sticks across is 82 in and three high is 61.5 in, so all 12 sit in one block about 10 ft long. For a quick sanity check, 10 fixtures is 875 lb per truss, and that same TOMCAT sheet lists 3,080 lb uniformly distributed on a 40 ft span. The article doesn't give hang points or spans, so that's a gut check and not a rigging plan. Your rigger has the final word.

The total

• SvoPatt duals: 15 cases, ~8 ft stacked (16 ft unstacked), ~3,825 lb
• Drivers and jumpers: 2 trunks, ~2 ft, ~700 lb
• Truss: 12 sticks, ~10 ft, 1,104 lb

That's roughly 20 ft of a 52.5 ft trailer and about 5,600 lb, or about 28 ft if the cases ride single. It cubes out long before it weighs out, and leaves more than half the truck for the tungsten specials, strobes and everything else on the plot.

I built it in Truck Packer so you can see it, and here's the pack. The truss rides at the nose, stacked four across and three high, the 15 duals go two across and two high behind it, and the two driver trunks close it out. It comes to 20 ft of floor and 5,630 lb, with the rest of the trailer empty.

The crew view: 12 sticks of 20.5 truss, 15 SvoPatt duals and two driver trunks in the first 20 ft of the trailer.

Top and side view. The duals stack two high at 60 in, which leaves plenty of ceiling for anything light on top.

The part I'd take to the shop is the width. Two across in a 98 to 100 in trailer only works if the case is 49 in or less, and one inch decides whether you've got a clean row or a mess. Get the real case measurements from the vendor and you'll know before the truck shows up.

Got a rig like this going out? Log in to Truck Packer and build the load before load-out.