Gregg MacPherson

more pics

...more pics..have to spread the upload over ore posts

These will be advertised on the cinemarketplace. Just wanted to notify here in case it gets lost there. Also, technical questions about the type, may, beyond some point, be more useful in the Eclair forum.

Two English 400'magazines. Cosmetically a bit scruffy. Fully disassembled, cleaned and lubed except for feed and take up spindles. New drive sprocket bearings and rubber take up tyres. No plastic pressure plate covers. This is the mag that Eclair designed for the ACL I, which had the small Tomson motor. This camera/motor/mag combination is designed to not overload. I shot a lot of film this exact way in the 80s. The mag draws less amps than the french mag. I tested the current draw after the lube and it was on par with a 200' mag English 400' mags run fine on any ACL. Some have used them unmodified for S16. They can be S16 modeded just like the French ones. The English mag take up system has two rubber tyres that wind the film emulsion-in onto the takeup roll. Looks weird but that's how the design keeps the torque low. Price (pair) USD700, shipping (pair) to USA or Europe, about USD120. Pictures below. Message me with an email address if you want more pictures. SERVICE NOTES..... I'm not a trained camera tech but I have now serviced three of these English mags for myself. Fully disassembling, cleaning, lubing, and a couple of adjustments. - Drive sprockets ball bearing replaced and plain bearing lubed. - The mag door latches have been adjusted so the door closes perfectly. - Sound deadening has been reglued in a couple of places.(Ados 4F). - The take up arm torque I set by feel (memory). - Pressure plate feels normal (not measured) - The "tyres" on the take up arm were replaced with tyres I had made. - Scratch tested, ok, and take up system ok, tension of the wind good and tracking, alignment good. Lubricants used.... - Oblique drive shaft gears and bearings...synthetic brake caliper grease. - Plain bearings that have load...tacky white synthetic grease - Plain bearings with no load (film rollers)...light synthetic oil. If you have a regular service plan for your camera then I would get your tech to give them a quick look over then. Some guys may measure the presure plate spring force and take up arm torque. NOTE: There is nick out of the rubber seal around the pressure plate on M3. Should really be replaced, though I don't remember a problem from it. Cosmetically they show wear and tear, little chips on the black paint, and one or two places where tape adheasive won't fully come off. No plastic presure plate covers. These mags never did, and I have no spares. I have made one out of cardboard and tape before (see pic) and a simple metal DIY one is here. M2 and M3 can travel with those. Any questions please ask.

If you can't read what the battery cell type is, maybe take a pic of the charger. The original NiCad charger is easy to spot.

Do you have a basic multimeter to measure V? Pins 1 and 4 on the canon end of the cable. Can't remember which pins on the jaeger socket on the battery, but trial and error to find out was safe on those batteries.

What about giving a cheap V meter to each battery pack. That could be also useful for looking at voltage drop while running at higher speeds.

Kinetals were used on Eclair ACLs. All ACLs have the same mounts and mirror geometry and shutter plane, so it doesn't matter which version of ACL. Cheers. Oh, Dom beat me to it.

Hey Uli, what I didn't explicitly say above is that you could get MK II or III lenses in PL mount and swap the mount to a used Arri B mount (may still find them cheap). Otherwise a new aftermarket Arri B mount may be the same cost as the PL ones, almost USD400. I think Visual Products used to list them. I don't know if the exact Zeiss eight hole mount geometry has been used on other S16 lenses. Optar Illunia? Dom might know. Cine Kowa may be another option, they were in Arri B mount.

Mk IIs with Arri B mount were quite common on eBay a few years ago. Their mount to lens connection uses the same 8 hole flange as the PL mount,. So the Arri B and PL mounts are interchangeable. Normally reshimed if the mount is swapped over. Aftermarket 8 hole PL mounts of reliable quality are not normally cheap, but used Zeiss 8 hole Arri B mounts may still be turning up on eBay cheap if you need that.

What ACL and motor do you have? I have two 400' English mags that I am going to sell. These mags were designed for the small Tomson motor. They have a low current draw take up system. Though they can be used on any ACL. They were fully disassembled, cleaned and lubed, new take up tyres, by me (not a trained camera tech but I have done these mags before). The scratch test is good. I will check the current draw before selling. PM me for any more info. Gregg.

I really love the old analogue Sekonic L-398(A). Rugged, reliable, a great backup meter and a great learning tool. And until recently, really cheap. The exp calculation from the reading is done with the dial on the body and is just routine. The sensitivity of modern digital cameras may marginalize it a bit now. At 800ASA shooting a tad down on T2 with only 8 fc, the scales on the meter are getting hard to meaningfully read at 8 and below. So Phil is right, I suppose. But "primative" is very unkind, and "very, very primitive" is....... Hendrikus, I bought one of these cheap for my son not long ago and he isn't using it. If you want to try it out for a sew days, PM me (upper right, envelope icon). Gregg.

I you can't find a proper made to fit one, then...these thoughts. I used to use what I thought was an Arri SR barney, draped over the rear of the camera and mag. It didn't fit properly around the front of the camera, around the lens like most of the "made for type" barneys do. And it worked very well. Trying to understand why, my thoughts were...The camera was very well maintained and ran very quiet to begin with. A properly maintained ACL camera I think sheds most of its noise to the rear. Anyway, maybe worth trying with what's available. If you are on the tripod you can even use a heavy woolen blanket folded a few times to create thickness. Whatever you use, vacume all really well so you don't introduce dust. Edit...Adding more ideas. Soft fabrics, carpets absorb sound and help reduce the reflections off walls etc. So the configuration of the environment and the shot(s), the surface qualities, the background sound, lots of things affect how loud a camera will seem.

Would crows be similar to seagulls with this problem. I thought there was some written about shooting Johnathan Livingston Seagull. Videos, can't remember. If that's a S8 camera then the light weight is making it harder. You could make an ineria rig that placed masses 300 or 500mm from the centre of mass (CoM). The critical axis, I think, is the pitch axis (nose up/down) and the masses for that will also steady the yaw axis (nose left/right). The rotational inertial contribution of each mass is proportional to the square of the distance from the CoM. Masses would be in pairs so that each pair is balanced at the CoM. You could have a shoulder pad and shift the CoM back to that. I would try that.

That thread path with the dotted line is correct for B wind film, emulsion in. Someone can check me, it's been a while. The solid line path would have to be an emulsion out roll, which I never remember seeing, or ever spooling off. So not sure how to explain that. Maybe this can arise when experimenting with some lab stocks. A wild guess. To my fingers the feed spindle is happy spinning either way, so that aspect is no problem. Re the problems generally...Agreeing what others have said. My feeling is that too much is put at risk... teaching yourself about film (there's a lot to learn), with an unfamiliar camera, of uncertain condition. My positive advice is that for your next project you invite a sympathetic operator or AC who has some gear and learn from them. Also, you can immediately find any 16mm shoots that are happening, talk to the people, offer to help, find a way to be near the camera, learn to load.

Probably, those that knew Bernie or had him fixing their cameras have already offered a kind thought directly to his wife. Now's the time. Gregg.

Hey Aapo, Do you know what the image stability is like for the Konvas and Cameflex? Arri II is pretty good by reputation. An enormous amount of material went to the big screen from Arri IIs, commonly intercut with material from pin registered cameras. Long time ago I did registration tests for a couple of 16mm cameras (16BL and CPA). Shot a grid of lines (byro pen on paper), rewound the film, rotated the paper about 3deg, shot the grid again. I don't know if the CP had a problem, but is showed what I had heard was the likely mode of instability for a non pin registered camera. The lines from the two exposures converge/diverge in a roughly sinusoidal rythm. The 16BL also matched the anticipated mode of behaviour, with tiny, almost imperceptible jitter. Don't know where that 16BL was in it's maintenance cycle. You can get a good qualitative sense of the image stability this way. But I think it's probably easy to actually quantify for non pin registered cameras also, though I never did it. The lines need intervals or hash marks like a ruler, or you could maybe just use pieces of a tape measure etc. Marks show decimal increments of the frame or something easily scaleable later. Note the varying position of the line intersection. These distances, expressed as a fraction of the frame height or width (of the object) should be a legitimate expression of the image steadiness. In 16mm the steadiness test can be shot on B&W, processed in a Lomo or bucket, looped and projected, but not many people have 35mm projectors. Maybe there is another way. Viewing the neg with an enlarger or improvising with a slide projector, or using a loupe. All one is doing is noting the extremes of the position shift of the line intersections

R16 has an oscillating mirror. I think oscillating mirror vs rotating mirror won't change the method of checking the ground glass focus.

I've had three different PL mounts that screwed direct to the TS mount on the ACL Les Bosher's one is beautifully designed and made. It's the best one but fairly expensive. Another one I had I was fairly sure it flipped the lens axis back and forth between standard and super 16, but when it went to Les Bosher for service after I sold it he denied that and didn't like it. I didn't believe it. The third one was lighter and cheaper...I do have photos. I would avoid the C mount option if you can, just because it's more fragile

@Uli...I had to sign up to see what it was. I thought it (Linkedin) would be less aggressive than facebook, but I was surprised at the volume of unwanted information from them. It was difficult to shut it off... So... cautious about having their privacy invaded

Linkdin is almost as bad as faecesbook (I trademarked that and they're gonna pay a few mill for it). Aggressively trying to connect you to their platform. That's the reason why people appear inactive, they are cautious. Let us know what comes up. Cheers.

Heikki, can you find Gerard, or the parts? I don't know what was happening to him...going out of business...something...he seemed a bit anxious when I last had email with him. The parts may have been bought at a cheap price by people that are not effectively onselling them. One guy in Europe who was always seemingly in the know was Boriss Belay. He's been on this forum. I may still have an old email address.

He said (not me said) that he bought the entire parts stock when Eclair went out of bussiness. This could be the motherload. And it may languish on the shelf somewhere if it's not distributed.

Really good effort Heikki. Parallel to this effort, do we need a separate thread to help keep track of where all the ACL parts are. A few years ago I sold a lens to Gerard, art-media.com who had a huge inventory of Eclair parts. He told me he was selling up, and then he disappeared. He had not yet told me who he sold to, but I remember, it was one or two guys in Europe I think.

That camera looks very cool. But I have to wonder about a reported noise level of 10-20dB..Is there any film camera on planet earth claiming 10dB...?