Gregg MacPherson

Busy for a day or two so will get to that one as I can, and will ponder whether one should. A pinned list sounds great, but we need to be updating it and include any research so that anyone can help. I have seen forums where they use pinning very effectively as a way to make ad hoc directories for the many useful threads they can't afford to loose. Seeking an orderly construction of thread topics/ subject matter we are fighting human nature and the gods it seems...witness the post above on sintered bush lubrication by the normally uber orderly Simon Wys, landing here rather than in a thread started explicitly just for that.?

Sorry, if you haven't seen that short paper that's not clear....100% and 90% were just reffering to the oil saturation level. @ Simon W. This is the thread where your insights about sintered bronze bushes should go.. Gregg.

From the graph showing oil content vs time, comparing the vacuum and hot immersion method in the page referred to by Dom above... Looks like the vacuum method gets about 100% and the immersion method get about 90%, so immersion sounds fine, just took 20 hours at 65-80degC vs 4 hours vacuum. Their vacuum would have been (guessing) full vacuum. The syringe, should be less vacuum. Vacuum pumps that pull close to total vacuum have been around for ages. I have one we used for composites. Actually, even an old fridge pump would be ok, they can pull quite a high vacuum. If the existing bushes are not worn i would be keen on trying to leave them in place, cleaning and re-impregnating in situ, which may be easy in a vac bag (infusion). Pressing bearings out, new ones in, or worse, having to resize the bushes, I'm not keen. Maybe if I had a wreck to test on I might be OK.

aapo, How do I pin a thread? Do I ask Tim Tyler? Before or after I make the thread? I'll sniff around in case the means are visible. Are pinned threads updateable? Gregg.

Hei Heikki, (if those words are in the right order)...I'm right now second guessing myself and wondering if, instead I should just put a big loud update on this thread. But for new people I think we need a new thread. And all the interesting stuff where people figure out how to do the ACL teardowns needs it's own list too. Gregg.

Well cripes people, we are 4 pages in, 3.5k views, expansively off topic and still haven't gathered a summary list of techs and what they do, accessible so that someone new can find it easily. I'm gonna steal Heikki's idea, start a new list, and on that one, only have the research on who, where and what they do, and a clear summarized list. Doing it now. I'll notify here when it's done. Gregg

Yes, makes me think that the spring force will vary, and may get weaker with age/use. The lock spring MIN106 if not replaceable could maybe be tweaked a bit, but haven't tried, don't know if it will tolerate it. If irreplaceable, be careful. I never tried a clothes peg. That would be a 1/2 clothes peg with those in NZ. I heard of one guy whos mag fell off and it just shattered into pieces...

The ACL uses many sintered bronze bushes in the movement block. They were, when manufactured, impregnated with lubricant that replenishes the bearing surface while the camera runs. There has been some concern and speculation on the lubricant's function with age. ACLs are about 40 years old, so some questions arise... In spite of advise in the user manual to never add oil, it's pretty certain that many people have been randomly trying to flood oil into the juncture between shaft and bush. Coupled with the potential for aged oil remaining in the pores, it seems unlikely that this ad hoc flooding approach is replenishing the bush. I speculate that it could allow a shallow region of aged oil to develop near the bearing surface of the bush, blocking the pores. Please, at any point, a few words from the wise will educate us all... There is one tech, Nathan Milford, who was doing intensive Aaton rebuilds, re-impregnating the sintered aluminum bushes under vacuum. I finally found an initial link to his posts on that...third post down.. https://cinematography.com/index.php?/forums/topic/7988-buying-an-aaton-ltr-7-super16/#comment-61048 Somewhere there are other posts of his that describe in detail his vacuum process, and more. If you find that, please notify...He last visited the forum on 2010, his website's still there, so maybe he could be invited in to comment... Nathan seems to say that the Aaton porous aluminum bushes may run dry after 4 years. I don't make any assumptions about the sintered bronze ACL bushes from that. All the anecdotal evidence suggest a much longer timespan. But it's all interesting. Questions that arise for the ACL.. Can oil be added externally to the juncture between shaft/bush? If so, how much, how often, under what circumstances...and what specific oil. Though almost any ad hoc procedure may give some short term lubrication, can some problems arrise in the future? Some clear protocols might be useful. Is it possible to re-impregnate the bushes? What are the methods? Can it be done leaving the bushes in situ? Pasting some useful content from the Technicians Who Service ACLs thread... On 4/8/2022 at 7:33 PM, Dom Jaeger..... "Sintered bearings will dry out over decades. I don’t think just adding oil would necessarily be detrimental, but yeah it isn’t the correct way to lubricate them. Here’s an interesting discussion on ways to relubricate sintered bearings: https://www.lencoheaven.net/forum/index.php?topic=24899.0 " On 4/8/2022 at 09:23 PM, Gregg MacPherson... .....Good condensed read on re-impregnation methods. A simple infusion might work. Put the bearing in a small bag with two sealed tubes coming out. An exit path (with a tap) for the vacuum and an inlet path for the oil. A layer of fabric in there so that air and oil can move between the tube entry points and the bearing. Apply full vacuum, immerse other tube end in oil and remove plug. oil will migrate into the vacuum. I assumed this might be one of the ways it was done. Infusion is used a lot now with composites (carbon/epoxy etc) and some practical things can port from that field. I wonder if bushes could be left in their housings, cleaned and re-impregnated in situ like that. Just thinking aloud. I have tried oil re-impregnating the porous iron plain bearings for the feed rollers in an old wood working machine I have. I found a target temperature online, preheated the bearings and oil, watched oil sweat out of the bearing, then immersed them. I thought that by preheating the bearing I might remove some old oil, and as the temperature dropped oil would be sucked into the pores. Gregg There's other content on the issue on the same page, but mostly it's summarised by me above..

It's hard figuring this out without having a wreck to pull apart. I rethought, and the screws/pins would need to be orthogonal to the oblique plane, the contact face of the trans. shaft bearing mount and shim. Heikki, any chance of an ECU pic of the shim from above, or even an eyeball check. Your CUs already look quite sharp. I often use a reading glass lens or workshop magnifier as a diopter with cell phone.

So is the shim tapered also in the Y direction, thinner to camera left. Wish we had an ECU of that from above. That's the only way I can understand it. The contact face of the transmission shaft bearing mount (MIN50) would also have to be oblique to match that taper, with its screws/pins orthogonal to the plate the assembly mounts to (MIN5). Is it a weird result of translation that gives the big plate that the whole movement block is assembled upon the name "front plan" (MIN5)...? I'm prepared to be wrong, so until we know the exact geometry of the shim and how that adjustment works, there's doubt...but I don't think the tension on the screws for the transmission shaft mounting are a means of gear clearance adjustment. One could try to observe the gear clearance at the extreme up and down position of the shim. We assume that the top position will bind the gears. Can one try to feel the clearance at the low position. Finger pressed hard on the lower transmission shaft gear and see if you can feel a little play in the shutter spindle assembly. All this speculation will disappear with a few short words from the wise....But it can be an unfair ask if the answer is long, so one needs to be careful not to tax too much the time of experts. The learning to fly analogy is a fun one...In gliders (sailplanes) the instructor sits behind you and you can have the illusion of being in control of your own fate..then he shows you a spin for the first time, and you are looking at the ground slowly spinning around your feet..... Gregg PS: All these interesting things may become lost on the forum due to the title. Maybe we need to plan more on the way we organize, categorize our information.

You can now place wanted adds on eBay. Don't know if it costs.

Slow Horses Contemporary English spy show with Kirsten Scott Thomas and Gary Oldman. Love those two and I'm always looking out for an English spy show where the level of detail and tech is high and believable. Remember Spooks, great with character but MI5 was a bizarely small little club. I watched Slow Horses episode 3 first by mistake, and thought it might be too clever and immersive for me. Now starting episode 1 and the first eight minutes, before the tittles were pretty amazing and convincing. Definitely worth a look. Now back to it... Gregg.

Mags falling off the camera..fact vs myth. The pertains to French mags as well, I believe, unless they have a difference in the geometry of the retaining mechanism that I didn't notice. If the mag retaining mechanism has too little spring force then the mag can fall off if the camera gets a big vertical jolt. Happened to me once jumping off a truck, holding just the top handle (zoom mounted, battery on belt). Mag landed ass first on very compacted, fine gravely road and was fine. Some writer(s) on the web describe this as if it's a generic design flaw. The retaining mechanism was I'm sure not changed with the intro of 400' mags, so perhaps the designers are at fault. Does anyone know if there were any changes to the latch or springs in the history of ACL? (excluding the obvious latch cover) Adjusting the spring force I found quite easy, by shimming under the catch tooth plate on the mag, #310 in Eng drawing below. Can't remember how thick the shiming, maybe 3 or more layers of tinfoil from a coffee can or something. If I added too much I think the latch wouldn't quite open, so that puts a constraint on it. If all mag fronts have the same dimensions (I wondered) then you have to shim all the same. A better method might be to modify or replace the release lever spring. See the UK parts catalogue for a drawing. So, fact or myth? Gregg.

Heikki, I'm glad (relieved) that you enjoy the humor... Perhaps a correction on my hastily introduced reference axes above. Most common convention for drawing may be the right hand rule (RHR). Thumb vertical, index finger pointing, second finger at 90 deg, so Z, X, Y, all positive. Sometimes the LHR is used in some engineering fields. Doesn't matter much, but if we use these spatial references, lets use the RHR. Gregg.

Sooner or later you'll get the motor schematics. That website opened for me and was interesting. Google translate worked well. Didn't yet see anything about ACL. Did see pics of electronics for Aaton motor and camera base. Lots of ICs. That must have been the big leap forward from ACL, going from transistors etc to ICs. Just kidding, I have almost no electronics IQ. I saw a photo shoped looking nude, and a very cool looking tweety bird.

I have a spare body here but I don't want to open it to look. It has plastic shims under the movement block mounting screws for the FFD and they fall off easy when trying to set up for re-mounting the block. So I'm stuck with the drawings and your pics. Can I introduce a local reference axis system. X axis is along the lens axis, Y axis is to the operators right, Z axis is vertical. All positive, negative being in opposite directions. My interpretation is that the three screws you highlight are just to clamp the assembly in place. The wedge shaped shim can adjust up and down. I don't get yet how this adjusts the gear clearance. How does the gear on the transmission shaft shift in the + -Y direction. Is the shim tapered in the +Y direction as well? Should be able to see that, looking from above (pic please). The drawings show different shaped shims, English/French. The French one, obvious taper in -Z direction, can't read the Y direction. The Eng one, may have a tiny bit of taper in -Z direction and has none or unreadable amount in Y direction. We have fun pondering and agonizing over the issue, but one or two techs will know the facts and method. An experienced tech, even one unfamiliar, looking at the movement block might see easily how to adjust the gear clearance. But what the the gear clearance should be and how to set precisely that.... Did you say that the friction or binding feeling varied with rotation? So more quesing and speculation...If the feeling is varying like a sinusoidal wave then one of the gears is effectively non concentric, most likely by a bent shaft. If the gear clearance is set way too close, maybe the natural error in the machining of the parts is showing, and increasing the clearance would fix it. If the friction or binding feeling is momentary and sharp during a rotation then it's probably a damaged bearing surface on the bush/shaft at either end. Heikki, you had a beer and a chat with the flight instructor (Boris or someone) and now you are trying to fly the plane. Just as you get the hang of it you realize that it has many unknown ways to kill you. But you have some spare airplanes, so you have some confidence.... Gregg.

If I followed you, it sounds like the gear clearance between the vertical "transmission shaft" and the shutter spindle assembly is too tight. But I didn't get how you were going to adjust that. Something to do with the way that the vertical transmition shaft assembly is mounted/shimed/screwed to the main plate (MIN 5, Front plan). I have pondered that shimming before, when looking at the block, but can't remember. Which screws are you referring to as "the MIN40E screws"...? Re the aged lubricants issue in the sintered bushes, I'm not sure what that shaft/bush would feel like to the fingers. My guess is that aged original oil could feel free. Aged oil from over oiling might have friction. I wonder if Eclair had a factory exchange system so that regeonal techs could just swap out a movement block and have it overhauled at the factory. Gregg.

Ok, I'll "check my fire",(stop the barrage) on that one for now. Good condensed read on re-impregnation methods. A simple infusion might work. Put the bearing in a small bag with two sealed tubes coming out. An exit path (with a tap) for the vacuum and an inlet path for the oil. A layer of fabric in there so that air and oil can move between the tube entry points and the bearing. Apply full vacuum, immerse other tube end in oil and remove plug. oil will migrate into the vacuum. I assumed this might be one of the ways it was done. Infusion is used a lot now with composites (carbon/epoxy etc) and some practical things can port from that field. I wonder if bushes could be left in their housings, cleaned and re-impregnated in situ like that. Just thinking aloud. I have tried oil re-impregnating the porous iron plain bearings for the feed rollers in an old wood working machine I have. I found a target temperature online, preheated the bearings and oil, watched oil sweat out of the bearing, then immersed them. I thought that by preheating the bearing I might remove some old oil, and as the temperature dropped oil would be sucked into the pores. Gregg

I flicked through the English drawings (good exploded views) and saw a variety of forms for the bronze bushes, but I don't know if any are standard geometry. It wouldn't surprise me if the tolerances for the shaft to bush fit in the ACL were special. But hey, someone with some new bushes and skill with the right tools could measure a new bush and shaft. Don't know how you measure a bush that small. Like I've been opining at length about, we don't know enough about the aged lubricant issues yet, we don't have protocols for the cleaning and re-impregnation yet. The Aaton bushes I read were porous aluminum alloy, and I thought they had reservoirs. We don't know exactly how the fluid mobility works for them, etc, so we can't just port all the Aaton ideas over to the ACL bushes. I do have a formal list of Aaton lubricants here somewhere, and I scrounged some tiny samples from Stephen Spooner at Panavision a while ago. Course none of that helps. The concern about aged lubricants may apply to new bushes also, but we can't assume that they have the same life span as bushes/lubricants in service. I assume longer lifespan.. I'm so anti the idea of people randomly trying to feed oil into the juncture between shaft and bush that I think it deserves them a place on the sh-t list. I can pretty well guarantee that this was a routine "service" for you know who before he turned ACLs around on eBay. Gregg.

Hey, watch it mate, those "Olite bushes" are bearings. Actually, I'm used to considering any loaded contact surface, even stationary, for its bearing stress. Interesting observation, no ball bearings in the assy. I wonder what the exact reasons are... Gregg

Servicing the "guide shoes" and their mounting plate.. The assembly of little ball bearings (each with a lip), hold the film against the drive sprocket. Called guide shoes in the drawing. The tech for my ACL I (Bruce Pierce) had a trick of cleaning the bearings (there's a gap at the inner edge of the shields), and immersing them in oil, then somehow must have drained them enough so they didn't drip. Maybe he had a trick to speed that up. I tried this on one of the Eng 400' mags which was not as super frictionless as the other. Those bearings normally should spin fast and free with a flick of your finger tip. Anyway, was a bit of work with disassembly and all but easy enough. Draining did take a while. Aimed some air at it, think that helped. The mounting plate for the entire guide shoe assemblies..On the French mags I have there are tiny screws to adjust the gap between the guide shoe ball bearings and the drive sprocket. On the English 400', none. I did notice a tiny bit of wiggle room on the mounting screws for the plate, so I improvised by using two layers of film to set the gap, then tightening the mounting screws. I don't know, maybe a new plate would position perfectly without that.

Just a clarification... The photo above showing the drive sprocket assembly, its from the Eng 400' mag. The drawing is from the Eng 200' mag. The sprocket drive hub on the Eng 200' mag, like the French 400' mag, has a V pulley machined into it for the take up "belt". The Eng 400' mag has instead a gear pressed on. That transmits to an idler or intermediate gear, then the take up arm spindle. Cautionary note...how easy it is to screw up... One of the sprocket drives, the detent in the shaft had burs from some prior rough treatment, that I did not properly debur. Fairly sure this damaged the brass bearing surface and maybe I damaged the shaft too. Lucky I had a spare mag wreck. A good example of not being observant and patient enough. The whole drive sprocket used to be a spare part. That would be quicker... Gregg.

I know that comes off as a bit of a waffle. Can I sumarise that, or what might ensue.... We need a few well qualified, experienced techs globally. Let's find them, support them, helping source parts, offering parts that we don't need. Let's encourage education and share information to help those determined to learn. But, do service manuals need to be kept off the public domain to avoid a proliferation of DIY f--kups? It needs to be considered. But if there is a subculture of serious minded people trying to learn some of the tech they need to share and communicate. Need to unpick the issue of aged, contaminated lubricants. Same for the sintered bushes. Gregg. PS: Anyone new reading this will struggle to find the short list of qualified techs, so we need to insert an easily visible update occasionally, or put it in a separate thread. Also, maybe a separate thread for random servicing questions. And the "shit list" for bad boy techs is still a viable thing I say...

I can't re-activate my eBay account yet so not listed. Offers..?

Heikki wrote..lost the origin sorry... ..."If it's a camera body that would essentially lie unused due to dried, messy lubricants and you wouldn't send it overseas for servicing in any case, why not learn a bit about how it works, try to service it, learn as much as possible from different sources..." I may come off as one of the OCD ones, sorry. I'm basically like Heikki,but more cautious.. I'm a believer in doing for oneself and learning by doing, but I think with rare old cameras some learning and development of skills needs to come first. Otherwise, if DIY camera servicing becomes more popular, a significant proportion of the cameras in circulation will become compromised, and/hence the pool of used parts also. The age of lubricants is a major issue to unpick. Some proportion (perhaps most) of the cameras will never have had a full rebuild, so will still have some original lubricants in there, transformed by age and added contaminants into something akin to grinding paste. What proportion? Also, as mentioned before, the behaviour of the sintered bronze bushes with aged lubricant. So these need to be understood. We need a big change in attitude about keeping service history of cameras. It's natural to reach for advice from people experienced with servicing the camera type, but I don't believe they would all have the same technical opinion. Widen the field to include those techs working during the active history of the cameras...and there would be strata of service/skills from partial CLA to complete overhaul. The same idea applies now with the diminished pool of techs. Gregg.