RESTORATION (Date 22-Mar-08)

This past Saturday was a very exciting day for this restoration effort. In between Easter Eggs, I went to downtown Buenos Aires to pick up a Lamphouse and a Pedestal. Another benefactor of this process, LFC, located this two machines for me and negotiated a decent price.

We got together in what was once the heart of the entertainment district, where we met a local tech, who is sitting on a gold mine in the shape of obsolete film exhibition equipment. Totally neglected, but with the power to shine again.

The pedestal ended up being a heavy and obtuse chunk of metal that didn´t appeal to me. Instead, I ended up exchanging it for a soundhead, which appeared to be an RCA, but ended up being a autoctonous José Reyes Soundhead.

The soudhead came together with a Westinghouse syncronous motor together with a drive train to transmit motion to the soundhead sprocket, to the projector and to the lower reel.




The Lamphouse I ended up buying is a Cinemeccanica Zenith 420. It was manufactured for carbon arc, was later adapted for a Xenon bulb and, after years of neglect, was ravaged for spares and any copper that could be sold off for a quick buck.

RESTORATION (Date 11-Mar-08)

One of the things that made this awesome paint job look cheap, was how the letters and the serial # were covered in paint.


Step 1 was, of course, to remove the paint.


Step 2 is to figure out if to leave them bare metal or go with some color. Maybe devil red...?

RESTORATION (Date 6-MAR-08)

The other big benefactor of this restoration, Dave Ritchie, went into great pains to get the chrome parts of his Ernemann Imperator to shine. (You can read about Dave´s efforts, here.)

I don´t mind admitting that I am way too lazy to go to such extremes, so I just gave my parts a good scrapeing and sent them to be nickel-plated.

Today I got those parts back.








"Not all that shines, is gold"

RESTORATION (DATE 4-MAR-08)

As it turned out, I already had the oil pump of the projector, I just did not know it. After a lot of legwork, and thanks to one of the two major benefactors of this restoration effort: Warren Smyth of New Zealand, I realised that that strange gear, inside of the lower sprocket casing, was in fact the oil pump! Go figure!

That little piece of pipe that´s sticking out beneath it is what connects the pump to the bat where the oil is collected.

As you can see, it is quasi-hard to suspect that the pump is hiding inside that casing once the cover is on!

FILM FOR SALE

UP FOR SALE is this Castle Films Super8 Short:

SPECS

NAME: Yesterday Lives Again
CASTLE FILMS #501
YEAR: Released between 1937-1967 and 1973-1977
FORMAT: Super8 Color
VERSION: Short
LENGTH: 200ft/60mts.
RUNNING TIME: 9 min.

BASE: Estar
SOUND: Silent
LANGUAGE SPOKEN: N/A
TITLE CARDS: English

CONDITION OF FILM: Fair.
Little or no scratching. Heavy Color Fade.

CONDITION OF BOX: Castle Film´s generic but Original.
Mint condition. See picture.

Price: USD 25,00+shipping and hadling

*I would be willing to trade it for another title.

**Shipping to the US $12.00

Dragonfly_films is a member of eBay (USA), Todocolección.com (Spain), Mercadolibre.com (Latin America). For transparency´s sake I will publish this film in the buyer´s choice of auction site. Interested parties, email me or leave a comment on this post.