Duncan Brown

The official answer from Alan Gordon Enterprises: "That's an attachment to an Arri -S camera to allow an NCEIII animation motor. These items are obsolete and not worth anything." OK then! Duncan

Hey, that's definitely the little guy in the picture there! Interesting that the Arri was one of the more expensive ones, but it's a sturdy, well-engineered and constructed thing, with some precision gears inside. Well maybe someday I'll find someone with an NCE III animation controller and motor going cheap, or better still someone with one of those and a big budget will be desperately searching for the Arri adapter 😉 I can't imagine more than a small handful of those were ever made. Duncan

Done! I'll report back. Duncan

I was wondering what motor would go so slow you'd need to increase its speed 3X to get into interesting ranges for the 16S, but I hadn't considered the original motor! Other than crazy nostalgia, what would make someone want to hand crank an Arriflex? Duncan

I have a very sturdy gear-up device of some kind which appears to be for an Arri 16 camera of some sort - at least the output portion matches my 16S motors exactly. The part number would appear to be 716GE-5 For every turn of the input portion, I get precisely three turns of the output ball. I guess a critical question is: what the heck fits into the input portion? In addition to the input wheel, there are also two threaded holes, which presumably are used affix the motor or drive device to this device, which then clamps into the camera the normal way like a motor would. (Do the other models of Arriflex 16, the M or the BL, have the same style motor attachment as the S?) Some pictures spread across multiple posts because of the size limits. Duncan

Made it a wee bit bigger? Everyone awaits your forensic pictures! Duncan

Oh! Then just the standard setup for that era. Everyone always (rightly, I think) says how hard that would be to recenter that setup for Super 16. Though I guess if you're Arri maybe you just re-engineer it for the new center position and crank out 25 of them? Duncan

Too bad he never posted a picture! I look forward to more pictures of yours once you get it in your hands. I assume it's a single fixed lens mount, not a turret? Which mount it has might be another clue to the date it was made. Duncan

Fascinating! Where have these been hiding all this time?! But they must have been made in the70s? https://www.fdtimes.com/2009/08/20/the-early-years-of-super-16-and-how-it-all-started/ Duncan

It's an 81MB file, tricky to email! But I just put a bunch of stuff up on archive.org so let's try a link to that copy: https://archive.org/details/arriflex_paperwork_scans/arri_16bl_parts_manual_october_1967_german/mode/2up Duncan

Here you go! https://archive.org/details/arriflex_paperwork_scans Duncan

I scanned this a while back and it might be of some use in your adventures. Unlike me, you can actually read it and not just look at all the pretty pictures! http://backglass.org/duncan/arri/paperwork/arri_16bl_parts_manual_october_1967_german.pdf Duncan

Another really nice one - an English/German instruction manual for the 16St. With good pictures, etc. http://www.backglass.org/duncan/arri/paperwork/arriflex_16st_instruction_manual_german_english.pdf 100dpi version: http://www.backglass.org/duncan/arri/paperwork/arriflex_16st_instruction_manual_german_english_100.pdf Working on an archive.org collection for this... (I already have an account there) Duncan