Lighting Grid

April 8, 2023

After going back and forth on when to build and hang the lighting grid, I ultimately decided to do it before the scaffolding came down.

I took advantage of a few warm spring days and I painted the pipes outside.

The pipes are 1-1/4 in. EMT, which is inexpensive and light-weight, but not very rigid in comparison to iron pipe. However, the lights I’ll be hanging won’t require the strength of iron pipe, so this was a fair compromise.

The cross clamps and hangers also needed to be painted, but I did those indoors since it was a much smaller job.

I sourced cross-clamps and hangers from a company that makes green-house kits.

On the day of my birthday party, Ryan came over early and helped me assemble the grid on the floor.

The cross clamps and hangers are fastened with 3/8 in. stainless steel bolts and lock washers.

Once a few more guests arrived, I recruited Ryan, Matt and Will to help hang the grid on the anchor points.

Each of the ten anchor points can support a little over 240 lbs. if loaded at the same time. Derated 8x, I’m aiming to never load them more than 60 lbs. The grid without any lighting loads each about 15 lbs.

Matt, who’s a mechanic by trade, was especially helpful in problem solving the best way to get the grid into place.

Due to a mis-calculation, the chains I got were too short and we ended up hanging it temporarily on only four of the ten anchor points using chains linked together to be double the length.

While getting the grid into place, I noticed that the although the clamps were very tight, the pipes were still able to rotate, making it possible for the entire grid to twist. So I decided to run bolts through the intersections around the perimeter to prevent this.

I made a little jig out of a section of 2×4 to guide the drill bit, which made this process much more consistent and easy.

Once these intersections bolts were added, the grid was incredibly rigid.

Like all steel structures, the entire thing feels sketchy until the very end, at which points it’s shockingly solid.

I decided to go with steel cables instead of chains, which incidentally were rated to handle over eight-times the weight of the chains.

I adjusted the tension of each cable by moving the hanger clamp toward or away from the center of the grid.

To ensure the grid doesn’t rotate or sway, I added more steel cables running diagonally.

Each lateral brace cable has a turnbuckle which allowed me to precisely adjust not only the tension of each cable, but also the rotation of the grid relative to the walls.

Finally I painted anything that wasn’t black with flat-black spray-paint.

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