What's New 14
December 2022
(This is for Brian LeGrady who asked about a cam tank problem.
Shortly after the Group 9.5 Autumn event, I made some foolish purchases and have spent much time since working on them, tho' I have to say I really don't know where the time goes these days.
Main things I bought were a Heurier Universal (my third, so I suspect it may sooner or later have to move on), an RCA Hollywood Constellation, converted to 9.5 by John Cunningham (this is asserted on the inside of the casing), without crossing the barrier of moving the sound track, so projection is via a mirror. The mech seems fine, but as usual the amplifier is not delivering and, as you know, amps are not my forte, so there is the never-ending search for someone to do it. The other things were basically Standard 8mm; an Elmo sound and a Kodak sound, plus some spare stuff. I am having a bit of a flirtation with Std 8 at the moment as I have over time acquired a few films. The features are mostly spooled onto 1600' cut-down spools, often retaining the 16mm core, because they were intended to be shown on a Heurtier Superson (the mag-only tri-gauge sound machine), equipped with extended arms. I have also catered for Std 8 on my revisions to a Long Play Unit acquired from Bryan Pearce (go to the Multi-gauge main page and scroll down), so I could actually show them on some ordinary machines, especially ones where the spool arms are both on top.
While we are on the subject, I have been told that a number of these converted Hollywoods were made. I have no detailed information, so I would be grateful to hear from anyone who can flesh out that story a bit.
November 2022
I am sorry it has been so long since I posted anything new. I'm afraid the website has been shoved down the queue by the more urgent demands of a carer, as since around my last posting 'er indoors did something to her back and her legs stopped working or doing what she told them and a fair bit of extra work landed on me. She is very slowly improving but still a long way from normal. One thing I managed to do some of was to close down my self-store unit in town, as the expense seemed far greater than could be justified. Things here got a bit crowded as a result. One thing that came back from the store was a Carpenter, which I was informed by my friend Paul Schimmel was pretty much a copy of an American design and consequently had an unusal amplifier. You can see this from the pix on the Carpenter page, but there is no text for it yet and anyway it is a work still in progress. As usual, the verdammten amplifier is the problem.
I was also taken off-line by what for me was a major job. The motor on my lathe has been giving trouble for some time and was coming to interfere with its work in support of the cine side, so I finally bit the bullet, took advice, and ordered a new motor from Machine Mart. These two pix will give you some idea of the problems I faced, being singularly restricted in my capability on grounds of age and health. You can see the very tight space I had to operate in, mostly lying on my back and squeezing in as far as I could get.
I didn't want to contemplate moving the lathe which does literally weigh half a ton (it's an old Harrison 11" for anyone who knows about such things). But the location of the nuts and bolts was a nightmare for me and it took me several weeks to complete the job, a bit at a time and, having done my back in a bit as well, having to be very careful about lifting. The good thing about it all was that, although I have had it for 10 - 15 years, the motor I bought was almost exactly the same as the old one, in every dimension. Anyway, it now works and I am advised this is not unusual as single phase motors (both of these were 240v four-pole 2HP single phase) don't seem to like running lathes and often fail. No one has yet told me exactly what it is that happens to cause this. Still, up and running again thank goodness - I was definitely feeling its absence.
I'm sure I've been doing other stuff, but I just can't bring it to mind. I'll let you know if and when I remember. Most recently, I have finally managed to get to a couple of fairs for the first time in years and talk to people and make a few foolish purchases, as is traditional. Outside of fairs, I have most recently made a much more substantial foolish purchase, comprising 1 Elmo Std 8 sound, about 4 Kodak ditto, an RCA Hollywood Constellation converted to 9.5 allegedly by John Shearsmith but without shifting the sound reading, so one presumably has to run the film thru the wrong way round and use a mirror (supplied) to redress the pic, or maybe a Dove prism(not supplied). All are in need of TLC. The final item is too - a Heurtier Universal with mag/opt capability (but no mag heads to support the mag bit). I should not be doing this sort of thing at my age but at the moment it's Hog Heaven.
February 2022
I have been undertaking a task which I could not resist. I acquired, sight unseen, a 35mm “portable” (it feels like it weighs 0.5 tonnes or 'arf a ton as we used to say) projector, a Koders (acherly, it is in caps and hav an umlaut - Ö - but plain Koders is simpler for me). It rapidly transpired that what I would be undertaking was little less than rescuing a projector on the brink of oblivion. It has obviously been stored in the damp at some point, maybe even dripped on a little, and the result was pretty dire, as the main frame and body of the machine was aluminium alloy and so prone to the white “rust” that destroys any surface finish. The side cover and key components such as the sprockets and sound drum were steel. The former’s paint finish (some form of metallic hammered finish) was lifting and flaking across almost its entire surface, inside and out, with the extensive length of vents on each end panel suffering particularly from the rust which covered most of the entire side cover. The paint held on with any tenacity only in odd patches where paradoxically the rust underneath actually improved adhesion.
The sprockets, sound drum, pulleys etc are steel which has been chemically blackened. While offering some protection against rust, this is by no means perfect. There were multiple areas of “spotting”, where rust had pitted the steel. Fortunately, little of this was in key areas, but cosmetically it’s never going to be better than second rate. Not least because the front plate of the machine, a solid piece of alu ally, is much affected by the white rust and, short of a complete dismantle and repaint and rebuild, it’s never going to amount to much. Possibly the worst of all the problems was the gate runners. These are two vertical strips of a Paxolin-type material, housed in slots and sprung to form the front part of the gate. Unfortunately, the slots are alu alloy and the runners were jammed solid, which took a bit of fixing.
There is also a cover (with a pair of what I have to call very lightweight handles given what they do) that fixes to the baseboard of the projector via luggage-style catches. In my view, only the fact that the catches on the baseboard actually continued round the edge of the board with extra fixings underneath allowed those handles to pick up the projector at all. Although superficially it was not immediately obvious, the catches turned out to be pretty much destroyed by rust. Worse, this extended thru the fixings and on into the wood - the securing bolts were just little bars of rust with no apparent threads and I still ent got them all out. They have left the wood of the cover rather rotted. The wrap-round catches seem to be non-standard as I can't find them on the internet, and anyway the weakening of the wood is going to mean I shall need a pretty ingenious and non-standard solution.
You might by now be wondering why on earth I am bothering. The answer, basically, is that I love messing about with projectors and hate to see a machine like this so neglected. Partly I have always wondered why it seemed necessary for 35mm machines, even so-called portables like the GBN, to be so massive. Obviously, endurance and durability for commercial use, but even so. This machine is the closest I have seen to a 35mm machine that is more or less exactly like the sort of standard layout for a narrow-gauge machine – sprockets above and below and in front of the gate, sound drum below the lamphouse and only a few extra bits to allow for the intermittent sprocket, plus very conventional spool arms. This simplicity does not however do much to make this anything but a bit of a heavyweight.
These pix give you a sort of tour of the machine. In pic 1 I had already started dismantling. The bosses above and below the lens support the shafts for the sprockets. The spool arms fit over the black bosses top and bottom at the front. The two knobs at the rear are (top) the inching knob and (bottom) framing. The lump under the framing knob we will come to in a bit. The gate is open, the runners are still fixed solid. The cap for the sound drum is off, allowing us to see the unusual red PEC. It is at edges and corners that the damage to the paint finish is most visible, but none of it is terribly good.
Moving on, pic 2 starts to reveal the basic construction of the machine, with a thick upright plate carrying the mechanism, supported by a heavily-built framework carrying the motor and amp. This framework was painted all over like the front plate. To me, this seems pointless and little of it was any good, except for gradually spalling off and making a mess. I scraped most of it off with little difficulty. A monitor speaker seems pretty useless against the clatter of a 35mm machine, but nonetheless there is one; just to the right and below is a socket for an external speaker. Note the take-up belt is solid rubber (none of yer spring belts here!), given its grip purely by the weight of the arm and film. This leaves the slipping clutch at the end of the spool arm to provide all the necessary slippage, which on many narrow gauge machines is assisted or entirely dealt with by the spring belt.
In pic 3 can be seen the huge fibre gears for the sprockets, driven by what seems a tiny gear on the inching knob cum main drive shaft. The intermittent box, pretty much central in this pic, has its own flywheel and a drip tray below because it is directly above part of the amp(!?). This drip tray caused me untold trouble when I was re-fitting the sound drum because it was rubbing on the main flywheel. Having settled it in my own mind that the problem was to do with the way the positioning of the flywheel was adjusted (true, but not in the way I was thinking) it took me a while to realise what the problem actually was. The motor wouldn't work when I first powered it up, but when I got it turning fast enough by hand, it fired up, pointing the finger at the start capacitor, hanging loose here. A new one soon sorted it.
Moving on to pic 4, you can see the obvious crack in the base of the capacitor, which had leaked, so not surprising it wasn't working. This machine runs on 115 - 125 volts. The input is via a Bell and Howell plug. Now, I always have problems getting my head around these connectors because of that blasted duplication between two of the pins. This doesn't have that and I worry it might be a problem if some one just plugged an ordinary B&H connector in and iot didn't match the current wiring (I'm not sure it's original), so I shall probably repace it with a 3-pin receptacle of some kind.To the right of the input is the lump seen in pic 1. It is a multi-position switch which goes from (I think) power on to things like the amp and framing light, then motor on, lamp preheat then finally de woiks. This all seems a bit complicated to me, as I would prefer toggle switches like the one just right of the rotary control which is for the exciter lamp. However, this rotary thing seems to do the job so I'll prolly leave it. If you look closely, you can also just see where the sound flywheel and the verdammten drip tray intersect.
Pic 5 is a bird's eye view for completeness. Pix 6 and 7, however, show the underlying horrors of what damp and neglect have done. The plate at the top of pic 6 is the cover for the hole that gives access to the underside of the amp, which I have tucked into a remaining scrap of covering fabric just to show it for the record, so to speak. It seems a weird way to gain (partial) access, at the cost of having to tip up the very heavy machine. Incidentally, once the amp is out, it won't stand up straight because those caps on the tranny at the top of the amp protrude below everything else. There is little sign of rubber feet or similar protection, if there ever were any. You can however see the wraparound catches for the cover. 7 is a glorious Technicolor image of the amp, only closer up. Actually, the amp seems to be in pretty good condition. Except it doesn't work.
Just a few extra pix at this stage. The first two show there were limits to how far I was prepared to dismantle for a machine that would be utiltarian at best, tho' I did remove and clean some of the bits you see here. Note in particular the brass parts - brass don't much like paint and here had rejected it more or less completely - I just tidied up. Pic 3 is the worst example by some way of rust to the blackened steel parts. But it is the main drive pulley! 4 shows the mess rust made of the latches, catches and of the cover - I just don't think it would be safe to use the same holes without reinforcement, but note the wrapround on the catch part.
I ent yet showed you the outer cover or the inner mech side cover.
The outside looked quite respectable at first, until you looked at the latches. Niote the cut-out of the base front left, which the cover extends into. This makes room for the take-up reel. The inside was difficult to photgraph as it's all terribly red and my poor little camera didn't know where to focus. There was a lot of discolourisation and white mould-like powder, quite apart from the internal "anchor" pieces for the handles, which have almost completely rotted away. And the felt lining had come loose and was ready to go further.
Pic 3 shows the inside of the mech side cover. This shot is after a lot of work removing not so much the flaking paint as the more stubborn bits that had managed to stay stuck on and sanding away the worst of the rust. The area along the top of the rear of the cover (about two thirds of the way up this pic) was heavily covered by thick layers of paint both inside and out, under which was a lot of filler with, underneath that, the rust you see here. I am a believer in getting to the root of rust rather than covering it with another coat of paint, so did more work and applied rust killer. Ironic that it was the rust creating the adhesion of the paint in this area. It appears to be some sort of butt-weld; I have no idea why as such a curve would seem no problem at all for steel of this fairly thin section. Maybe the sides and top are a single piece, with the specialised pressing for the vents all on the one piece? Pic 4 shows the vents which are as usual very difficult to work on - I had quite a bit more to do after this pic was taken. Pic 5 is a detail of that join seen in pic 3.
I suppose you could call this batch of pix "after" pix, although I have done little with the paint on the main plate of the mechanism.I have however had a go at painting the side cover with silver grey Hammerite. Far from perfect - it's just too big for my small workspace - but at least it will look better, runs notwithstanding, than it did when I started and won't rust for a while. I now need to clean up the top cover, re-cover the base and devise a solution to the fixings and appearance issues. Then there is the amp, tho I may cheat and just use a diode fed to an external amp, tho the exciter lamp feed seems to come from the amp tranny. So, plenty more to do yet, but now it runs and has light. It also has that typical 35mm clatter - no wonder they usually got shut up in a boof. Once I've done, I'll make up a new page for this machine in the 35mm section of Miscellany.
January 2022
I spent a lot of time over the period from mid-December, thru Xmas and well into the New Year improving and expanding my record of what I have done so far with the Pathescope film producing machinery. I have left all the detail in the Novascope section under 9.5 silent; there's an awful lot more there now than there was half an hour ago.
December 2021
Having set the Super Vox to one side pro tem (see below) I have been playing with the behemoth known as the Heurtier P26 24 Std 8 and Super 8 dual-gauge sound projector. I will do you some pix in a bit, but I could do with some help, if anyone out there is able to assist. The projector is a monster, like its name, and in true Heurtier style comprises a stand-alone silent projector with multi-speed capability, which can sit on top of a long amplifier that has room to also mount a separate sound head unit. I have only a poor copy of what seem to be poorly-written and rather difficult to understand Instructions, and what they cover, tho' the page count is complete, seems a bit lacking in detail.
First off, it seems to me that this machine cannot match either gauge's sound separation - am I right or am I missing something? - which would make it completely useless for anyone who does not both make films AND add their own sound - I think there is a Bolex one which has a similar problem. Anyway, the amp itself seems to work fine with a feed into a two-banana-plug record deck input, but not a peep from the film sound track side. The Instructions I have seem to be from a later model with differences in the amp sockets and controls. Mine also has a contol knob at the rear as part of the speed control set-up, but it do not attach to anything so either something is missing or it's maybe a feature of the older machin? I don't think so, as the knob is correctly labelled, but you never know. If anyone has a Service Manual for this machine in all its various parts, I would love a scan (I can do the scan if you prefer - I promise to keep the original safe). Another possible problem is the sound unit and/or the magnetic heads. I made a big mistake many years ago when I somehow let go of a spare one of this unit. Let it be a lesson to me to obey the second Commandment; never throw anything away/sell unique spare bits. When I think how useful it would be to have that unit now to experiment with without the risk of permanently damaging the only one I have.............
I know, assuming I am right about the useability of such a projector, that I am to some extent wasting my time, but I do this purely out of interest and not in the hope of a sale or whatever. Any comments/help/suggestions would be gratefully received at the usual email address (my initials,mas then the "at" sign then the website name minus the www. bit of course). Those who have not embraced digital technology can find me living with the Secretary of "Flickers" magazine, tho' given what I read about lack of mail staff affecting Xmas post.......
Anyway, here's hoping for a safer and more nerd-friendly New year and I hope you all have a good Xmas. I may be back, but there's a lot to do before Xmas so I thought I'd get my retaliation in early.
Earlier this month on Cinerdistan.com...................
Bin having another of those marathon struggles with a recalcitrant projector. This goes back to when I had to fix a Super Vox problem with some stripped teeth in an odd location, on the same machine. It now turns out that the shutter timing was wrong (tho' it's hard to tell when there is so much slack in the system). This means as a minimum taking off the lamphouse. The original gasket, already in two pieces, got worse in the process, so I decided to make a new one. I made a mistake with the first version, by using a sort of rubberised cork material, which tends to stretch and go floopy. A first attempt at re-timing the shutter having failed, the lamphouse had to come off again and the gasket did not survive, so I've had to make another. First time, I tried to copy the old gasket, but this was actually quite tricky and inaccurate, so this time I used a spare gate plate casting, to which the lamphouse attaches with the gasket between. I clamped this over the gasket stuff and cut round with a freshly sharpened Stanley knife. One word of warning about this. There are four screws that directly join the lamphouse and gate casting, three entering from the front of the gate plate and one from the rear, accessed by a hole thru the fanhouse casting. It is easy (I speak from experience.......) to confuse the small threaded hole that this back screw goes into with another adjacent hole which looks just like the ones from the front. Not disastrous, as the false hole falls outside the gasket area and there is still room for making the hole in the correct place.
This simple account conceals a horror of failed compoments, dropped screws and hours (and hours) of time. Amongst other things, the lamp holder failed - it had one of those slotted things with two channels that take the pins of the lamp as you insert it. I don't rate them; this one had burnt out. I cut away unecessary bits and just used the lampholder part, with a socket with flying leads that just plugs onto the lamp. Then the motor switch failed.
We now enter territory safe only for the deepest-dyed nerds (like me) as others will be cut down by terminal boredom. Here are some pix for you.
I have made up some names for various bits so as to label them in pic 1. Note incidentally that there is also a lamp switch which is virtually identical, but has the contacts, with terminals, on both sides - see switch base. (This enables the pilot light to be on when at rest but cut out when the lamp is turned on). The lever frame attaches to the base thru the two larger holes on the frame, into the marked holes .One problem is that rivets are used for this, so it cannot be taken apart without drilling out the peened over bit either on top or below, leaving the question of how to re-fix. The other two holes in the lever frame are threaded and accept the screws from the outside of the main projector base casting to secure the switch to the body of the machine. Pic 2 shows the other side of the lever frame and one of the rivets.
There is a groove in the RH end of the switch lever as shown in pic 1, into which the lever pivot fits loosely, and then the slot for the lever pivot rides on the central section of the pivot. The spring fits between the lever pivot and the washer and is compressed quite a bit when fully assembled. The contact pivot point should ride in the centre section of what should be one contact, not two. The failure was in the breakage of the central section of the contact, seen more clearly in the inset at bottom right. Pic 3 shows how I planned to re-fix the switch. I cautiously countersunk the two former rivet holes to take M3 screws and leave a flat surface - said surface is right up against the inside of the projector base casting and if not flat would leave the switch moveable or eneven. The trusty box of spare spacing bits yielded up the "nuts" seen here (I think they were once part of spacers for a film spool). I have also cut a slot for a screwdriver in one end, after taking this pic, as spanner access is non-existent.
The problem is I have been quite unable to manipulate the various parts (including a replacement contact thingy I made on the lathe) so as to get them together against the force of the spring. This is part incompetence, part arthritis and part my long-standing neuropathy (which is taking away all the feeling in my fingertips). I shall have to find a young person who does not suffer from any of these three problems. So in the end I just cannibalised, from a machine already much altered and which, if it ever sees the light of film again, will not suffer from having non-original switches. And I still don't know if the shutter is right and now the amp seems to be playing up and, as you know, I am not an electronics sort of person.
November 2021
I may appear to have been pretty inactive of late, but that isn't completely true. The pdf below shows a large part of what I have been doing, ie working on reviving some of the machinery used to produce Novascope films in the 1970s.
3printa.pdf
There were basically four main items:-
a) a perforator (although the one I have is not the same one, although nearly identical) for puching 3 sets of 9.5 perforations and 2 sets of pilot perforations
b) a triple negative maker, which I tend to call a printer tho' it ent quite what is normally meant by that term
c) a contact printer where the triple negatve produced by b) is run thru with positive stock to create new printed films
d) a slitter, a fearsome and noisy machine which cuts the printed postive into 3 x 9.5 and two waste strips from the side (which carried the pilot perforations), at a furious rate. This is the one machine I do not got.
I did a lot of work on the perforator over a year ago but have not really written it up. More recently, I have been working on the triple negative maker, which is covered in the pdf. I have made quite a few changes to this account since first posting it here, adding page and picture numbers, re-ordering the material, adding more about the finished 16mm end and making various minor changes for clarity etc. I will also add in due course some more stuff, about the triple splitter lens used in the neg maker and about one part of the perforator mechanism. The whole lot will appear in the Novascope section, under Novascope Machines at http://cinerdistan.com/9-5/13-9-5mm/history/470-novascope-2?showall=&start=2
Marguet Rewind
This is something that looks like it ought to be a Baby accessory, but ent Pathé. It really caught my eye when I first saw it and I have finally got round to cleaning it up. Which is pretty much all I had to do, except find another screw-on spool retainer and fit new rubber feet. Here is what it looks like.
As you can see, it still has its Marguet transfers, eg on the base and the film inspection thingy. I think this was a pretty good design, covering three gauges (and a Super 8 adapter would be easy enough to make), film inspection and splicing all in a single rewind. It is made as a 9.5 rewind, with adapters that fit up to the 9.5 drive head and have a notch to accomodate the 9.5 drive pins.
It does have some flaws to my mind. The main one is that the arms are held in position only by friction; it needs a pin such as is often seen on spool arms eg 200B, Lux and Vox. As you can see, the unit will take 900' spools, but I think it looks more comfortable with 300' - 400' spools. Imagine trying to wind the last 100' from a 900' spool; I don't think the friction from the wingnuts or the friction on the rubber belt drives could cope. On a minor point, the separate spool retainer nuts are more fiddly and easily lost, as one was here. They could easily have had their own parking station like the gauge adapters.
(copied to Gear)