This is a story about how incredibly stupid I showed up to be last weekend. At least it will give someone a good laughter as I show my bad judgement and inexperience.

Oh well: I had bought a Super 8 film that showed up to be rewinded. The last user had just put the takeup-reel in the box and forgot to rewind. I had just one free reel of at least this size which was my own takeup-reel (I have two others, but they were home and this was at my cabin). I needed two to get it spooled back in the right direction on the reel it came with.

Then I got my "brilliant" plan: Couldn't I just rewind it onto a 16mm reel and make sure the film was tightly fit onto one side? If I was careful, it should work. Well. It did for a while. But when I was almost done, the film fell from the top onto the wrong side. And then it happened again with more film, and yet another time. And before I could manage to explaining to myself how stupid I had been, the reel looked like this:



The film had crossed its own path several times. So the "end" of the film was there inside some place covered with a lot of film from further into the film. The film also ripped off at one place as it jammed. It took me one hour to fix this mess. I tried to be as careful as I could. I don't think I made too many stripes. I didn't even want to know, so I used Filmguard on it before I watched it. It didn't look bad. The film had damages to the sprocket holes a few places, but I don't think I made them. I lost two frames where I spliced it.

I guess I am one of very few that even considered doing such a stupid thing, but if there are some of you out there that suddenly get the idea to use a 16mm reel just to fix a rewinding problem on Super 8 and think that it will work if you are careful, then DON'T.

That's all from the entertaining department in Oslo!

Don't feel badly Eivind. Your idea made sense. I once received a 16mm film on a core. I only had one empty reel to mount the film on. I had to wind it off of the core onto a partially filled reel first (this was before I got a proper takeup reel for the machine). But I didn't have quite enough space for it and this was done on the machine, as I didn't have rewinds. The film spilled off and became a curly mess! It took awhile to straighten it out. I eventually got the film onto the intended reel, but it was a headache! It just goes to show that you can never have too many empty reels lying around. They have come in useful when I wanted to transfer an 8mm film off of a rusty metal reel onto a lighter weight and better looking plastic one.

What I could have done was to lay the 16mm reel flat. Then it might work. But then I couldn't use my rewinders.

I did something similar with a 16mm film when I first got my powered rewind - went way too fast lost control, and ended up with spaghetti!

Once, I was watching an 8mm film without a care in the world. I didn't realize that the take-up spindle had stopped moving. The film was moving through the gate & past the lens just fine. When I looked back at the machine to see how much time the movie had left, my film was in a pile on the floor!

I remember that happening when I was at school too and we heard a outcry from our teacher as she realized what happened :-) I remember we all thought it was hilarious! I have tried that since myself too.

Eivind,nice idea don't be put off by small mishaps these things happen.
Something along those lines happened to me but it was with 35 mm film which came of a rewind plate and film went all over the projection room floor and that I can assure you is a right nightmare needless to say I did not finish on time that night 😀😀📽📽