It’s hard to be upset about things breaking when you get to have this conversation.
Stage Manager: Hi. I hate to bother you, but the chair isn’t spurting blood anymore.
Me: What’s it doing?
SM: Blood just dribbles out onto the stage instead of shooting across. We really need spurting blood.
I went down to take a look and couldn’t duplicate the problem. So, I fiddled with things. Everyone agreed that it was working. I went home.
After the show, I got another call, this time from the technical director.
TD: It stopped spurting blood again.
Me: You’re kidding.
TD: I figured out why none of us could get it to fail. We weren’t letting the blood sit for an hour before spurting.
The theory is that there’s a hole somewhere in the line that is allowing air to enter and that the chair is spurting air bubbles instead of blood. We got nothing else to work with so I’m going down tomorrow to replace the tubing.
Or perhaps one of the one way valves isn’t sealing properly and letting air in from the nozzle end of the tube.
Possible, but it works when it’s just loaded and it’s worked for the past couple of weeks. The nozzle end of the tube is just open. The valve action is down in the bulb, which the actor pumps to squirt the blood.