Dom Jaeger

I have them for sale. Please reach out if you need Bolex parts, I have a large inventory.

Hi Bill, I would absolutely recommend getting a turret plug and maybe even a top lock assembly for the turret if you are going to fit a long, heavy lens like this. Otherwise, you need to make absolutely sure that the support is set exactly to the right height and centre, because it doesn’t take much to pull the turret away from the camera front and throw your focus out, or worst case begin to permanently deform the turret plate.

This is the C mount adapter for dog-leg zooms which have their own reflex viewfinder. I think the other part locates in a second lens mount on a turret Bolex to lock in the orientation.

Look forward to hearing how it goes!

Nice work, Gareth! I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole, given the original condition, but it seems to be working ok now! It’s also something of a testament to the quality of the materials Arri used, a lesser camera subjected to such corrosion would not normally be salvageable, at least not without parts being replaced. I might start recommending you when people bring me things they appear to have found at the bottom of a harbour! (Happens all too often actually..)

The prism Simon is talking about is the piece of glass behind the lens port, the beamsplitter that sends some of the light to the viewfinder. Very, very occasionally the spring that holds it in place is misaligned (by bad servicing I always assume) and the prism can be loose. It is designed so you can flip it out and clean the back surface and field lens on top (in the case of an SBM), and then snap it back in place. If you haven’t already done so, you should get hold of a manual and read it through, knowing your camera is quite essential. Here’s a free copy of an SBM manual: http://www.vintagecameras.fr/images/MonSite/BOLEX/H16_Reflex/_Doc/H16_SBM_Manuel_en.pdf Your pressure plate and the plate beneath it seem ok. If the film stock was also ok and the loop seemed good then I’m perhaps beginning to suspect the zoom, though it’s an unusual fault if it always seems sharp at the opening frame. But maybe a loose optic is shifting around, or there is play in the zoom mechanics. It’s usually better to use the viewfinder for focussing, unless you know for sure that the distance marks on the zoom are correct. They should both agree at any rate. With cine zooms, you generally focus zoomed all the way in, and then zoom out to the view you want and the lens should stay in focus. If the focus drifts, then the back-focus is out and needs to be calibrated. Or the lens has a fault within. Honestly I think your kit needs to be examined in person to determine the issue, perhaps there’s something an experienced technician will pick up immediately that you can’t see, or will find with tools like a collimator. The cost of a quick professional check is less than the cost of one spool of film, processing and scanning, and can save you a lot of headaches. Ultimately anything bought off eBay or the like in unserviced condition should be at minimum checked if not serviced if you want to ensure a good experience shooting film.

Hi James, Hmm, that’s an interesting fault. A loose pressure plate is hard to do on a Bolex because the lid doesn’t close properly if the pressure plate is open, but sometimes it can be not quite latched, or the plate with the hole that it latches into can be bent or damaged. A bad loop can sometimes cause focus issues, but it’s usually accompanied by jitter and instability. The condition and age of the stock is probably worth looking at. If you have a prime lens maybe shoot your next roll with that to rule out any issues with the zoom. I service and calibrate Bolex cameras and lenses in Australia if you ever need your kit looked down the track. Feel free to email me anytime via my cinetinker gmail.

There used to be slight variations in perf pitch and size depending on manufacturer and age, and before the 90s the perf dimensional tolerance was a few hundredths of a mm, so registration pins in 16mm Arris have always been tapered to account for this. I was trained to check or set claw to reg pin spacing using a steel 16mm film replica tool. Entering the perf as cleanly as possible was a requirement for silent cameras like the SR series. SR3s introduced pitch adjustment to allow you to tune down the noise, because of the slight variations in perf pitch from different manufacturers. But an Arri 16S uses a slightly smaller registration pin that doesn’t fully fill the perf height, so it makes sense to have it minutely advance the film each time it enters, as Tim describes, essentially using the lower surface of the perf for registration. Noise wasn’t an issue for these cameras. 16mm Arri reg pins only ever control vertical steadiness, with the side rails or a side spring controlling it laterally. The pins never fill the perf width. 35mm reg pin systems are different, often utilising 2 or more pins with different dimensional specs to control both axes.

Moved from non-existent vapourware to prototype now? Your friend‘s story seems kind of flakey, I wouldn’t put much stock in it.

Well if your friends told you so it must be true! There is one in the Sydney Powerhouse Museum, I don’t think they normally keep vapourware in their collection. Bruce McNaughton (Aranda Group) designed and made a whole bunch of interesting stuff including doing many if not most of the 35mm 2 perf conversions done in the 90s and 00s and S16 conversions to cameras no-one else would convert.. he was something of a maverick genius. But Steve‘s description is accurate, he was virtually a one-man band and the US technical support was poor. They were successfully used on a few movies but eventually the Burbank branch folded and in 2009 the digital revolution wiped out film camera rentals and that was that. I think Bruce lost his home after investing a lot of money making six cameras. The cameras are clearly not BLs, they just use similar looking co-axial mags. As Steve described, the film path twists sideways before entering the camera for the 8perf horizontal gate.

Are you surprised that it’s harder to reassemble?

Be careful of the Morbid videos, he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about sometimes. Richard Jura‘s video above is much better, but it doesn’t show you the mechanism plate separation which you’ll need to do to remove the motor. A crucial step is to disengage the limit gear in order to let the motor fully unwind, but this only applies to flat base models which use a different motor, so you don’t need to worry with a round base M like yours. You need to remove your H16M front in order to get the mechanism out, which is just 4 screws, hidden under the decal and leatherette. A bit of acetone dripped in the edges will loosen the glue. Unlike the reflex model in the video above where the shutter is in the front, an M model has the shutter connected to the mechanism. So with the camera as in your photos you need to slide the front off towards you with the shutter positioned on the back side. Open the loop formers and remove the pressure plate first, so you can make sure the claws don’t catch as you slide off the front. Then just follow the video above. If the spring motor is broken, you will need to replace it. Re-assembly and calibration is much harder than disassembly, but since this camera looks to be toast treat it as a learning experience. If you actually want it working again, I would send it to Simon Wyss in Switzerland, who has replacement springs and knows how to reassemble a Bolex.

You could try removing the front optics and see if that allows access to the iris, but to get the iris out you will need to remove the pin that connects the aperture ring to the iris cage, and sometimes that is a two stage connection with an inner barrel as an intermediate. Usually a lens needs to be disassembled to remove an iris cage. It may be held in by a lock ring, or a circlip, or set screws, or the front optical group. Rebuilding many-bladed irises is tricky if you’ve never done it. You might also find that the loose blades have had their pivot pins ripped out, which makes things much harder.

Yes it’s a persistent belief even among professionals that a longer lens has less distortion (and I’m assuming they mean geometric distortion not perspective distortion as David described, which is clearly distance related). But geometric distortion is really an aberration linked to angle of view, and the particular design used to achieve that angle of view. It has nothing to do with focal length per se. If you took two lenses made for different formats that had roughly equivalent angles of view (say an 18mm made for S35 and a 25mm full frame) the distortion would generally be similar, and any difference would be solely due to the optical design choice and the vintage more than anything else. It’s perfectly likely that a S35 lens might have less distortion.

ELs are typical 1970s electrical monsters, with wiring everywhere and boards squeezed into cavities, and in order to properly test them while disassembled you need a special Bolex jig to hold everything. It’s easy to introduce other problems while working on them or find after hours of work that the fault remains, and it’s not possible to simply replace an entire board because those parts are not available. Many Bolex techs, including myself, don’t want to work on ELs for electrical faults for these reasons. I don’t need the headache. The manual is very thick and complicated, with multiple diagram variations depending on the model iteration, and references multiple custom Bolex tools and jigs which won’t mean a thing if you don’t have the tool or jig. The only people I know who will attempt EL electronic repairs are in the USA: Du-All in NJ and Abdul Setoua in Queens.