Jump to content

Duncan Brown

Premium Member
  • Posts

    554
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Duncan Brown

  1. I was answering that guy's questions about his motor on the FB Arri group, and then when he put it on ebay and it didn't sell I said I might be interested in it for a lower price, just to investigate...and so he relisted it on ebay with an even HIGHER starting bid and it didn't sell and when he relisted it again for that same higher opening bid I asked him about it on FB and then he deleted the whole thread. So maybe beware of that seller? I know the motor is nearly identical to a motor I have that works with the German single-frame/animation controller (see footnote). The way that thing is built, there's no way to get power to a normal motor from the camera connection,, so this special motor has its own power connection coming in the back side. This ebay seller's motor was different, in that it had also a power connector (like a fake end of a power cord) coming out the font side, which would pass its power through to the camera if you plug the motor directly into the camera and not through the animation controller. Why would you do that?! Why not just use a normal motor? I don't know. That's what I hoped to investigate if I could buy the pile of unknown parts for a more reasonable price. We'll see if he ever gets a clue. (footnote) The Arri US single frame/animation controller is a whole different ball of wax. It's a control box and a motor that work together as a unit and plug into a 115VAC wall outlet. It's way bigger and more complicated, with lots of onboard switches, whereas the German version is quite compact and gets all of its control inputs via connectors. They both can control a capping shutter and a strobe, but the US unit can directly do tricks like forward/reverse, push to take a picture, push again to advance frames, etc. (Probably possible with the German unit and some external logic; I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.) Someday when I get more time I'll take lots of pictures and write up lots of descriptions about all this... like I tend to do with this stuff. If anyone has instructions/wiring diagrams for the German unit, let me know! But it looks pretty straightforwrd to figure out. Duncan
  2. That other flicker thread: Duncan
  3. From one of the other flicker threads in this forum, I posted a slo-mo video of the ACL mechanism in action. You can see it's a very very tight dance between all the parts. Works just fine from the factory but if you start widening the gate or moving the lens mount, the dance gets that much tighter, and I think the mirror starts coming into play rather than just the shutter. Duncan
  4. Ooooo, pretty! Does anyone know where to sell kidneys? (Asking for a friend.) Duncan
  5. Of course you should keep it and use it, but just for all of us ACL-porn mavens, you should post lots of detailed pretty pictures of it anyway 🙂 Duncan
  6. Woohoo!!! Duncan
  7. Speaking of the vital software - it's not awful, I've certainly used worse, but it really irks me that any image changes you make (gain, color balance, etc) are immediate, permanent, and un-undoable. Crazy, there's no "put everything back to the defaults" button (there is one in a couple of specific settings areas) and not even a ctrl-z-undoes-last-thing-you-did feature. Like if you're trying to scroll up the panel contents with your mouse wheel and the mouse pointer happens to be ON a setting when you do that, whooooops! Duncan
  8. Some more quirks I discovered. I usually try to use the camera in tethered mode because it all just works better, but sometimes I'm not close enough to a computer and IT hasn't gotten me the laptop I requested for this yet 😞 so I'm forced to save to CineFlash. First off there is all kinds of weirdness with the file naming, at least the way it shows up in the app when you access the camera. Files can show up under different names than they previously had, new files don't always get the higher number names, files you are sure should be there aren't, until you delete older files you no longer need, then the newer ones show up, etc. I've taken to just erasing the CineFlash before each time I need to use it. Then the files I save up show up named in the order I saved them, they're all there, etc. (This may have something to do with the timestamps on the files, which are all starting from the default date when the camera powers up because I never remember to set the time and date manually on it - another advantage to using it tethered, it handles that automatically.) Pretty consistently now, the final frame or two of the last file I save ends up corrupted, and when you try to save it out from the app to another format, the save fails. The easy answer is to just re-trim the video in the app to lose those bad frames, but I've taken to just saving the last file twice before I'm done with a session and ignoring the second one. YES, I wait a while before powering the camera down after the last save, it shouldn't be an issue of interrupting the file write, but who knows. Easier to just work around it. Duncan
  9. An AC motor is almost certainly a sync motor, something you'd probably want in studio use when recording sound too. 12VAC is a least a lot easier to deal with than 120VAC! There's probably some way to make a say, 24VDC-powered power supply that puts out 12VAC with enough amps to run your motor. Duncan
  10. If you're new to TS-mount adapters, there's always this thread I started a while back: Duncan
  11. The ACL has the very useful TS lens adapter system. The adapters thread on to the threads on the outside of the big silver mount on the front that has the C-mount in the center of it. Sometimes those adapters can be hard to find for sale, though at least two different groups are in the process of trying to make new ones, including some (eg PL-mount) that did not exist originally. BUT!!! If what you want to do is mount CA-1 (Cameflex) lenses to an ACL you're in far better shape. Of all of the TS lens adapters out there, that is by far the most plentiful and they pop up for sale here, on FB, and on ebay pretty routinely. Heck, I would sell you the extra one I own, except that I lent it to one of those new TS adapter groups and haven't gotten it back yet. Duncan
  12. Fascinating stuff. So only about 150 of them ever made? I guess sometimes things are rare for a reason. Interesting it says this Georg Thoma made crystal sync motors for the Arri 16ST, but so did Georg Jensen in Denmark. So many Georgs in the crystal sync motor business. Duncan
  13. I've seen a lot of different connectors on Perfectone motors, not necessarily all stock - it's an easy swap if you want to accomplish something else. Maybe the pilot tone signals are on that connector too? Duncan
  14. Bold strategy. After getting no bids whatsoever with an opening bid of $4699 he's relisted it as a Buy It Now auction... at $6999! With no Make Offer option. So yeah, that auction may be there a long time... https://www.ebay.com/itm/355882556086 Duncan
  15. Duncan Brown

    Bolex PRO

    I hate including an ebay link in a post, because a couple of months from now the link will be dead, and someone searching this site years from now will be really frustrated. HOWEVER, you don't see a Bolex PRO every day so this seems worth posting: https://www.ebay.com/itm/355841511332 It's a legit seller (I bought some ACL mags from him and received them in short order) so at least it's not the usual scams, but obviously no way to know for sure the condition; he's just a bulk reseller. I'll try to at least attach some pics from the auction, for the historical record. Duncan
  16. Ah yes perfect, there you go! S16 markings with the original marking still there in case you want to frame for 4:3. Best of all worlds! Duncan
  17. I agree that's behaving like a mirror-parking motor though it's interesting that it more or less ends up at the right spot on its own and the "parking wiggle" is minor to nonexistent. The proof is kind of in the fact that once it's stopped you always have a perfect view through the viewfinder! (That being the point of mirror parking after all.) And you are correct that the inching knob is not nearly as critical a piece on a camera with a mirror that parks in the right spot. On a spool-loading camera like an Arri 16S, you really need the inching knob to help with loading the film, but on a magazine-loading camera like this...not so much under normal circumstances. We never asked, because we were just going by the pictures, but since you have it there in your hands: is there a little icon on the motor cover (the one you took off to see about the inching knob) that looks like a windshield? (I guess it's supposed to look like the shape of the mirror.) That's the other proof, if that's there and just wasn't obvious to us in the farther away pictures. Your viewfinder video brings up another question: what are the ground glass marking like? From that video we can see the original regular-16mm markings, but is there some other marking or shading in the S16 aspect ratio? Glad to hear this camera may live again! Duncan
  18. Lubricant in with the coupler seems unnecessary, but as long as it's something like silicone which won't eat rubber it shouldn't really hurt anything. Duncan
  19. OK so it looks like the clutch assembly would have been in that circular well in the body surrounding the motor shaft, whereas I think on some other motors it was farther away on the shaft. It looks to me like that's a screw thread there, going into the motor shaft. If you could remove that nub of screw, you could theoretically put on a new clutch/knob assembly, though goodness knows where you'd find one. Though it worries me that if it's broken off like that, it's because the motor is stuck. But here's how to find out, since you don't seem shy to disassemble things a bit: remove the motor from the camera body. Three long screws and pull it off... VERY CAREFULLY!!! Very straight. Bit by bit. Don't lever it off of center at all. There's a very very fragile mini connector in there whose housing will break if you get it off axis. I'll attach a picture of what it will look like. There's a motor shaft with two pins, that goes into a rubber coupling, which goes onto a shaft in the motor body with a similar two pin arrangement/ The rubber coupling will likely stay with the motor or the body as you pull it apart - don't lose it! SO at that point you should be able to turn the motor by hand, if it's free. You should also be able to reach into the camera body hole, easier if the rubber coupling is on the shaft in the body, and sort of turn it with your pinky, to see if the camera mechanism turns freely. Duncan
  20. That motor looks a little different from the ones I've seen, so I'm not entirely sure how it would have been originally, but I will say the ACL motors Ive dealt with have deceptively complicated inching knobs. They're one-way-clutched. I'm not sure if that's so you can't inch them backwards (who cares) or so they don't grab a string from the camera operator's sweater and end up choking them to death... Duncan
  21. A curious/nosy/obnoxious lot indeed! Oh, and if you do decide to part it out, it's pretty clear we're also a ravenous lot when it comes to scarce ACL parts! (I still want to know what the Visual Products box it comes with is.) Duncan
  22. There's an in-between level of buyer (I am one of them) willing to be optimistic about the unknowns, based on what can be determined as knowns, so willing to pay more than parts prices, but not top dollar. I have been seriously burned a couple of times like that, and have had great wins a couple of times... it balances out over time. And the burns sometimes at least leave me with spare parts to help salvage the next sad case (though at the moment I don't have any ACL spares... very few people do, it seems.) I just hope it goes to someone who can and will use it, whoever pays for the service and needed parts. Nothing sadder than a good camera in a closet. Duncan
  23. In the current (not-as-roaring-as-recently) market, I wonder if spending all the money and time on a complete service is even going to pay off enough in an increased sale price. That's the kind of thing that only truly pays off if you USE your investment back out of it, as the new owner. (Which sucks for the seller, who has to take comparatively less for it, but there you are.) Duncan
  24. I was just going to say, you are in a prime position to tell us just how hard/expensive it is to find the correct motor for one of these cameras, if the one it has isn't up to snuff 🙂 Duncan
×
×
  • Create New...