Lighting help for show

[Valerie Adams]

I'm looking for suggestions for lighting my indoor show booth next month. This is for an annual show I do where I'm using pipe & drape, so there aren't any cross poles over my booth. I've got track lighting with halogen spots (or floods, I always forget which), so they're heavy. I've got them zip-tied to 8 foot long metal bars which means I've got to use them diagonally placed over the corners of my booth. That's been ok but last year someone bumped my booth from behind, knocking one of the bars down, breaking lights and a few pieces of my artwork. My booth this year is 8x10 feet; I'd love to have two light bars extending in an L-shape, since that's how I want to do my tables this year.

But that means needing one pole that can be over 10 feet long, so it overhangs my P&D a little on each end (I secure it to the pipes) and one that's a bit over 8 feet. Oh yeah, they have to telescope or something, since I don't think my van will fit an 11 foot pole! I've seen people with Pro-panels using those cool light bars that attach on top of their panels, but with P&D I don't have the structural integrity.

Any ideas?

[Morganica]

Head over to a used store fixtures place and look for the stands they use to hold sign frames in stores. I found a couple for $10 each like this:
The bases are pretty heavy. I bought thick-walled PVC pipe that fit over the base pole and some ell and union fittings. At the show, we set the bases on either side of the entrance, joined the PVC into a U-shape with the ell fittings and slid the whole thing over the bases.

You can get around the long pole thing by using two or more shorter poles with PVC unions. Then get piece of galvanized pipe, just smaller than the inner diameter of the PVC, and insert it at each of the unions. That'll keep it from sagging. The longer the galvanized pipe, the less sagging.

You can see it here, wrapped with navy blue organza, and without the galvanized inserts. It holds lights pretty well.

[Marty]

http://www.innovative-sys.com/index.html has telescoping cross bars and the coolest hanging brackets for suspending them from your pipe and drape. Nice folks too.

[Valerie Adams]

Thanks to both of you!
Marty, it appears I've only got to buy four little brackets to solve my problem!