For the want of a piece of heat tape

Anyone who survived 5th, 7th, and high school science classes would understand the basics of heat and the reactions that ensue when high levels of heat come in contact with a small piece of thin metal. Readers Digest version: it gets center of the sun hot. Sadly, when time is of the essence and you have to move quickly, this fact must be overlooked in the interest of time managment. This is a fact that has put me in a spot of personal trouble quite a few times in the past weeks.

This is where gobos come into the picture. Taking a gobo out of a light that has been on and off for the past 3 hours can be painful if the gobo has not had time to cool down. And in a rotating rep theatre, it almost never gets that time before someone has to pull it out to replace it with something else for the next show. 

As of recently, the gobos has started falling out of their holders because the tape that is used to hold them in place has finally started curling due to heat and needs to be replaced. Problem 1) I can never find heat tape to fix the problem, and 2) the gobos are always too hot to the touch. The result is as such: me, jumping around like a small child who only steps on the black tiles in a grocery store, holding a piece of metal with my shirt as far away from my body as physically possible without taking my shirt off, then throwing the gobo to the ground and cursing everything I hate in this world. There are people who have been in theatre 50+ years who have patterns burnt into their fingertips and palms from handlng gobos that are too hot. I hope not to join that club in short order. 

And all of this could be solved with a simple piece of heat tape...