Quote: Tom Photiou wrote in post #42I'm sure this is the Elmo model they use to use at the college i went to during my apprenticeship years, i always remember how unbelievably quite it was when it was running. From i gather these are excellent machines, spares are hard to find but they are good work horses, like there junior counter parts. The only thing i wish my Elf had was a 3 pin claw, but happy with what we have.
My Elmo and Eiki (which is the same as Elf) have 2-pin claws. 16mm B&Hs suppsoedly have 3-pins, but I've never had one.
You cannot find 3 or 4-tooth claws, electronic/mechanical speed change, switching from 2-blade shutter to 3 in Japanese 16mm projectors, but only manual change via belt on pulleys. Flickering in 18fps is inevitable. Its a Japanese style generally.
You cannot find 3 or 4-tooth claws, electronic/mechanical speed change, switching from 2-blade shutter to 3 in Japanese 16mm projectors, but only manual change via belt on pulleys. Flickering in 18fps is inevitable. Its a Japanese style generally.
I've never had an issue with splices on my 16mm machines. (If I get a print with more than a handful of splices, it goes right back to the farkakte seller!) I'm not sure I'm sold on any advantages of claws with more than 2 teeth. What machine has 4 teeth? I've also no need for 18fps on my 16mm machines. But that's just me.
Right! (I see that you're in a country that still embraces old-school shaving with safety razors and such, and produces Derby blades. I ditched multi-blade cartridge razors a few years ago and go old-school now.)
So as I said, the extra teeth provide redundancy basically.
That being said, if I receive a film with that much damage, it goes right back to the farkakte seller.
Again, if the film jams, the 4-toothed claw will slice through 4 adjacent sprocket holes. Even that machine on the films next showing can't handle that unless you cut out some of the film so no more than 3 adjacent holes are damaged.
Forget 8mm then ... ok so my 2-teeth 16mm projectors show a rock-steady image, and have no issues with the occasional splice.
As I mentioned somewhere on this site recently, I had to repair the loop-restorer function on my Elmo 16-CL. On an otherwise excellent machine, the fool designers made 2 mistakes: not including a manual loop-restorer, and emulating Rube Goldberg in their design of the auto-restorer.
The metal bar that hangs down just above the film is near the actual loop-restorer, which should be good, but they communicate via a 3rd party (Rube's distant cousin.) When the film hits the bar, it raises it up. That in turn engages some kind of gear with a rough surface, that triggers a solenoid, that sends a signal back down to the loop restorer to do its thing. Like scratching your left ear with your right foot.
After a lot of trouble-shooting an an attempt to find a repair in the service manual, I discovered that I had to re-roughen that gear, since it has worn down and was smooth. So it slipped on another piece instead of trigerring it. (I'm going by memory here -- it's been awhile.)
Service Manual and User Manual Loop restorer: page 13. They tell you how to take it apart, and to reverse the steps to put it back together! Page 45 explains how it works. None of the "adjustments" worked for me, since that wasn't the problem -- I had to take a metal file and roughen up a plastic piece. They don't tell you THAT in the service manual!
Herein lies the problem with these service manuals -- they show exploded pics of all the pieces, as if you were going to take the whole farkakte machine apart. The "troubleshooting" sections usually has fixes for everything but the problem YOU'RE having!
Anyway, anyone who had the Mousetrap boardgame as a kid will understand the Rube Goldberg-ness of all this.
Anyway, if one's machine is constantly triggering the loop-restorer, one probably needs to repair one's films better.
The auto-loop-restorer on my B&H3585(Eiki SNT) is also the sensor. Come to think of it, that machine doesn't have a manual restorer either.
This all begs the big question -- how are all these films getting so much damage? Is it farakakte machines, or farkakte projectionists? Many, many years ago, I was selling a film on eBay, and I mentioned the splices. A buyer asked my why it had so many splices? I rightly told him I didn't know -- it was like that when I bought it!
Another thought: with that 4-tooth design, won't the framing be off if an alternate tooth engages the sprocket hole? Then you have to reframe until the next damaged sprocket hole is encountered and a different tooth takes over.
You have very interesting thoughts and questions I am happy with.
Since the 16mm film has total single perforation corresponding to each frame (two halves of a perf.), framing is a rare thing unless it was printed correctly in contact printers. Also, no shutter out of phase occurs as seen on 35mm and larger formats.
There is an inclination on the top of each tooth, and the pitch length of each tooth relative to each other is different.
In your case, since the tooth lengths are different, any of tooth will catch the perforation at a specific sinusoidal pull-down stage, de-framing wont occur.
BTW, you will be happy to hear that I made a mistake above about BAUER P 6 which utilizes 3-tooth claw instead of 4.
I guess I'd have to see it in action, but from the description, only 1 out of the 4 teeth will ever pull the film down. To me, that means that each tooth would leave the film at a different point at the end of the pulldown. That has to be the case, otherwise more than one tooth would be taking part in the pulldown -- the description says only one does. Therefore, a framing adjustment would have to be made unless the difference is small enough that it occurs on a part of the gate that is covered by the aperture. Depends how closely you framed the picture to the edge of the film's frame.
I'm not sure I understand why if you have 4 teeth that all 4 should not participate in the pulldown. What advantage would having only one tooth participate do? From my argument, this will only cause a potential framing issue. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding that doc you linked to.
Not sure why 16mm would not have framing issues in general -- I have to reframe when projecting different reels. Again, depends on the size of your gate aperture, and how well you center the frame when you make an adjustment.
