Home 9.5 16 Multi-gauge 17.5 28 Pix Miscellany
9.5 MISCELLANY
Click here for Lux
Click here for notes an the main pulley for a Pax
All my headings are more to do with projectors than cameras, so these will have to slot in here. From David Richardson, of course.
A thing that took up a lot of time was the making of a telecine machine.
This involves a major and serious crime that I have constantly inveighed against and for which I can offer only a limited defence. Basically, it involved cutting the side of the lamphouse off a Specto and fitting a camera instead of a lamp. Let me start at the beginning. A year or so ago, Pat Moules and Tony Saffrey saw the machine made by the Welsh National Film Archive to help in the preservation of rare films on 9.5. Instead of the more usual approach, the camera was placed in the lamphouse and a light shone thru the lens barrel. They were fired with a spirit of emulation, as the results were remarkably good. Tony bought a camera and a lens, and muggins here was lumbered with the task of actually making a practical set-up.
The
camera had only very limited attachment points - two screws top and 2 more
bottom, all at the front end. I therefore made a pair of plates that used these
holes to attach them, and left lugs sticking out from the plate at the rear for bolts to hold a rod at each
side, which sort of grip the sides of the camera and ensure the plates don't
move. You can just see one of the rods lurking at the edge of the black box at
the rear, of which more in a bit. (As you can s
ee,
there are a series of control switches on one side so this has to be left clear.)
To these plates I fixed two angle brackets, to which in turn is fitted a flat
plate. This plate slides between guides on the plate in pic 2; the guides are
hidden by the brass strips which overlap the plate carrying the camera keep it in situ. The face of the plate
is covered in brass sheet, because I found alu on alu did not slide at all well.
That's the trouble with what is essentially prototyping, which is basically what
I am doing most of the time - you only find
problems as you do things, then it's
a choice of start again or find a work-round. The vertical plate is mounted with
another angle bracket. You can see at the bottom of the
vertical slide that the angle bracket is doubled. This was a late amendment to
allow me to use trapped bolts, which you can see sandwiched between the
brackets. In the underside view, you can see the big nuts (one smaller cos of
lack of space) used for finger tightening, with holes for a tommy bar for full
tightening. You can see on the left the extra screw into one of the columns
needed to hold the back cover plate on.
Having
gotten to this point, I turned my attention to the projector itself. Having
removed the mechanism, and most of the stuff in the base, I fitted the posts you
see here. They use the original holes for bolts which held a tranny, except for
one I had to relocate as it was partially obscured when the mech was in place.
They have a (long) screw thread at the bottom and are secured by nuts from
underneath. I
subsequently used the extra length of the threads as the mountings for a plate
carrying the 12v power supply. I fitted an extra switch so as to power the
camera and the light source separately. These rods support a flat plate on which
the camera slide assembly described above sits. Slots in the angle brackets and
in this plate allow for to and fro and side to side movement of the camera.
Actually this wasn't the first job; that was fitting a plate to cover the
shutter to protect both it and fingers.
I next turned to the light source. I Initially made a unit with a 12v miniature bulb I had to hand, but this has now been replaced by a rather more sprauncy LED array, as shown in these pix.
The little LED array in the first 2 pix (to give you an idea of scale, they are 5mm LEDs) sits inside a tube (pic 3), which is a nice firm-but-sliding fit in the Specto lens barrel. The other end is covered by a bit of plastic to act as a diffuser. The final pic here shows the underside of the base. The small tranny was originally in one of those bricks you plug straight into a socket, but I cut it open to fit in here. You will also note that I replaced the original Bulgin socket with a standard euro type. Wiring not quite finished yet in this pic and I dunno why that white jump lead is there.
All of this took place as a kind of avoidance activity before I could bring myself actually to
bite the bullet and take a saw to the Specto. In the end, I justified it to
myself with the thought that I could always make another 9.5 machine by
switching parts from a dead 9.5 machine with an 8mm Specto - there seem to be
loads of these, in good nick and cheap, and I know it can be done cos I've got
one.
I finally steeled (aluminiumed?) myself and hacked away the side of the
lamphouse so all this stuff I had been making could actually be fitted to the
projector. Tony Saffrey brought along a bit of 16mm-reperfed-to-9.5 TV test card
and we set it all up. These shots show our very basic lash-up and the amazingly
good results we got more or less at once - I spose we didn't ort to have been
surprised as the Welsh Archive had done it and all we did was copy. (I hadn't
really noticed the shadow under "Pathescope" before).
What we found was that, as advised from Wales, we needed
extension tubes between the "C" mount lens (F 1") and the
camera.
What we also found was that the standard sizes of 5, 10 and 20mm did not quite
work - in the nature of things, we needed something between. Fortunately, all
the threads on the lens and the tubes have enough length to allow the insertion
of "washers" of various thicknesses that I made out of aluminium. We also found
that the focussing ring on the lens itself made little difference, tho' it was a
bit better at its minimum of about 18". The main impact on focussing was moving
the camera assembly itself. However, latest advice from Wales suggests the same
can be achieved by an adjuster on the camera which moves the CCD.
This is the thing more or less complete. You can see I made posh knurled knobs and all! At the top you can see a brace I fitted when it became obvious that the angle bracket mounting the vertical slide did not give enough stability. It pivots at the end you can see, and the other end is slotted to cater for movement of the assembly. The slotted end rests on a column, visible past the camera, which took the place of one of the screws securing the horizontal bed plate. Tony Saffrey expressed concern that the connections at the back of the camera could pose a problem in regular use and be prone to being bashed, so I fitted the black plastic box as a cover. The connections from the camera are led out to sockets mounted on the box, so in general use there is no direct mechanical connection to the camera. If the sockets in the black box cause problems, they can be far more readily replaced than those on the camera itself.
Various bits remain to be done - refitting the arms and the 16mm claw that I removed for some reason yonks ago so it will be a dual gauge machine. I have also fitted a switch on the front below the motor so that the machine can be left plugged in without the tranny being on. I have removed the rubber feet and have metal cross bars to fit in their place so it can all be screwed down to a heavy board for extra stability. (In fact, what I did was to make a sort of plinth, so that the machine can be operated without the front spool having to hang over the edge of a table. It also makes a space where a box for 16mm parts etc can be kept.)
Basically, my part is done and I shall hand it over to Tony and Patrick. I don't actually know how to actually record anything, tho' I did watch an MM M reel all thru. Running a film on a projector and watching it on a TV felt quite odd. Why am I betraying film in this way, you ask? Well, I don't feel that I am. What we are doing is taking advantage of modern technology to extend the use we can make of film. Do you realise that the high-grade frame enlargements in Flickers are copied by digital means? Just another dimension to our endlessly fascinating hobby.
The Pathescope Pax projector (see under
Joinville Eqpt) has a belt drive from the motor to a pulley, on
which is mounted the shutter. The pulley in UK models is made from Mazak, and has a tendency to distort and ultimately disintegrate, just like the
flywheel in a Baby projector. The pulley runs in a narrow slot between lamphouse and
projector body, so any distortion causes it to start rubbing
. With the awkward
brush arrangement for the speed control contacts, it's all terribly difficult
and fiddly to get at. I had to do this once, and get a pulley made (courtesy
Buckingham Film Services). I made a drawing for making the new one. It all
worked out OK; somebody else might find this of use.
Pathé did a pretty flash-looking instruction booklet for the Lux...........
.......but would you really want that grinning loony showing films to your kids? He's obviously some sort of psycho. A typical nine-fiver, in fact. (Just kidding, guys!)
German Pathex, courtesy David Richardson.
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