Projector Repairs

Well, it's June, which means we're only 10 days away from our Saskatchewan One Take Super 8 Events. While our films are still at the lab (after being held up by Fed-Ex in tornado weather in Memphis - just glad they didn't make it to OZ), it was time to tackle a long overdue project that was making me a little bit stressed.

Both of the One Take Super  8 Event projectors were due for major maintenance having serviced many events in many locations over many years. They've been jostled in cars, buses, airplanes. Crossed borders and time zones and finally were showing their age.

A couple years back I had a friend order some replacement belts off Ebay, fingers crossed that it would solve the problem (both projectors would no longer play films at speed), but when I opened up the backs of the ST-1200 and ST-600 today I really had no idea what I was doing. Thank goodness for the internet which provided me with a fantastic pdf of the original ST-1200 manual on how to replace parts, which I have now permanently saved to my hard drive for future reference. As you can see in the photo one belt (from the ST-600) was snapped and beginning to disintegrate, turning sort of jelly like. I'm glad I got it out before it got all over the inside of the project. Voila! 18fps perfection. Onto the ST-1200 which was a bit more intricate to remove the belt (turns out it was just stretched too much so wouldn't run off the motor). Thanks to the manual schematics telling me which screws to remove to get access to the belt drive, within minutes a new belt was in and VOILA again, 2 projectors running smooth as can be. If I was more tech savvy, there would be play by play pictures and videos demonstrating the process for others to reference. But I'm just not built that way.

Now just the decision, which one will make the trek to 2 cities to show at the inaugural event in Saskatoon, and the 11th Annual in Regina. (Just a hint, likely the brighter projector I have a spare bulb for :) Hope it can make the trip, but glad that I might get another 30 years use out of these 2 tanks. Elmo sure knew what they were doing when they produced these models. No cell phone will ever work this long.