Section Four
Care and Maintenance of your
Merlin-C
®
We have strived in engineering to make your Merlin-C as maintenance free as possible. If you
remember only a few things, it will be very easy to maintain and should give you many, many
years of faithful service. The Merlin-C has three enemies:
Dirt
:
You must keep your Merlin-C clean! Clean the lenses with a dry optics cloth available at
any sunglasses store. Clean the outside with a damp cloth. Do not use solvents or cleaners on
either as this may damage, discolor or otherwise hurt the finish of both. All of the bearings inside
your Merlin-C are sealed, so they cannot get dirty and you never have to oil them!
Purchase a can of “Dry Air” or other Air-in-a-can type electrical component air blaster and a
small, fine horse hair paint brush from the hardware store or an art supply shop. Once every two
or three weeks, open the Side Plates, the Base Access Covers, the Y-axis Covers and the Lamp
Plate. Using your brush and your can of air, gently blow-out and clean the inside of your unit,
making sure that you clear any ports, vents or holes that help your Merlin-C get fresh, cool air.
Take a good look at the fans and make sure that they are especially clean. Take care not to bump
any of the circuit cards or color/gobo wheels too hard or damage your lamp as you do this. For
the details on the care and cleaning of position sensors, please go to
www.Toplt.com
DO
NOT
use an air compressor to do this job! First of all, most compressors are much too
powerful and you may well damage a number of components inside your Merlin-C. Secondly,
most air compressors have far too much moisture in them due to condensation and you could
end up getting the inside of your unit WET! This leads us to another enemy:
Water
:
If you get the inside of your Merlin-C wet, you could likely do more damage than you
want to pay for. A shorted circuit card could cause other electrical components to overheat or go
bad as well. Never use your Merlin-C outdoors unless you are under some sort of cover or are
absolutely sure that there is no chance of rain or horse-play involving liquids! Outside installs are
an absolute NO-NO! The last enemy, and probably the one you will encounter the most is:
Heat
:
If you get the inside of your Merlin-C too hot, you will cause irreversible damage. This is
why you must keep it dust and dirt free. It is also why you must
not
use the Merlin-C outside.
Besides bug infestation, you can also get condensation from dew, rain or rapid temperature
change and the Merlin-C was not designed for use in these conditions. NEVER operate your
Merlin-C when the ambient temperature is at or exceeds: 45 degrees Celsius. Your Merlin-C was
engineered to run VERY cool. You will notice that with the exception of the Lamp-Plate, you can
touch the unit anywhere, even after it has been running for
hours!
Keep it clean and it will
always
run cool!
We have included an extra belt for each axis on your Merlin-C; a large one for the X-axis and a
thinner one for the Y-axis. Eventually, these belts will wear out and either begin to jump off their
gears or break altogether. We didn’t want you to have to wait for the part, so we gave you the first
ones for free! For instructions on replacing one of these belts, please go to our website:
www.Toplt.com
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Section Five
Troubleshooting Your
Merlin-C
®
We have worked tirelessly to engineer your Merlin-C for years of trouble-free service. We built it
as good as it could be built with the highest quality materials available. Each unit is exhaustively
tested at the factory before it ever goes into its shipping box. Before we released the Merlin-C to
the public we tested units in every condition imaginable (and a few that aren’t!). We banged on
them, we shook them, we spun them, we heated them and we cooled them …
While
they were
running! We even left units running for over five days straight without stopping! We don’t
recommend that you do any of these things to your Merlin-C, but believe us, this is one tough
instrument.
Belts/Movement/Un-Responsive Heads
(Head won’t respond, does things on its own, won’t stay lit)
As with anything that moves or has moving parts, you will eventually have parts wear out. This is
par for the course, so to speak. The first and most obvious things to wear are lamps and belts. We
have included a spare belt for
both
the X and the Y-axis
with
your Merlin-C. Why make you wait
for a part that will so surely go at some point? We are professionals, just like you. This seemed
like such an obvious thing to do for us. No other Company that we know of does this.
If one of your Belts should start to jump the gear or fail/break completely, please see our website
for complete instructions on swapping them out. Or, you can call any Factory-authorized TopLite
Dealer. If the instrument will not move on one or both axis, (and it is
not
a belt) then the problem is
one of two things: either your DMX data is corrupt or you have a problem on a circuit card inside
your Merlin-C.
To begin troubleshooting this problem, first, run both a pan and tilt test (see “Test Mode” in
section three), if it works, then the problem is most likely data. This can be one of several things:
A bad cable, a unit not sending data down the cable run or a unit not reading the data as it arrives.
To check your data, first look to see if the Purple/UV LED DMX Signal Indicator is lit (see figure
13.) The light should be on solid and not blinking or “stuttering”. If it is, then the data may be bad
due to a bad cable. A sure sign of this is that every head beyond the first “bad” head is also acting
strangely. However, if the cable is good, there may be a chance that the Merlin-C in the cable run
before
your bad head is actually not transmitting data. That would mean your trouble is actually
with
that
unit and that the rest are fine. This unit will need to be serviced by a trained technician.
To test for this, reconfigure/experiment with your cable run to look for clear data and to find the
point where the data goes corrupt. You may also wish to check that your Terminator plug in the
last unit is snug in its socket. If the problem is not a belt, cable, terminator plug or the transmitted
data, then you have a bad circuit card inside your Merlin-C and it must be serviced by a trained
technician.
17
