Mark Dunn

The question remains- who bought all the bits? It sure wasn't Dwight.

Wow. Didn't see that one coming, neither did Dwight. He was my go-to guy. The Steenbeck website went weird a couple of years ago and now it's gone altogether, along apparently with Janssen, the owners. There's a possibility of inventory becoming available in the UK but I can't say more at present. Looks like we should be booking museum places for our Steenbecks.

Is the sink in shot? If not you may be able to cheat the camera further out into the room and use sticks.

From what I can see, the spool flanges have to be flexible as they are levered apart by the sprockets when the mag is attached. This is why the camera is so small. So a metal spool simply won't fit.

I'm guessing OP doesn't have any of that equipment, and this is presumed to be colour film.

This looks like a twisted screw (like a corkscrew) going through a shaped slot? If you can dismantle and clean and polish the screw and slot, and the rack on which the bulb travels on its two rods, this will help. I don't know about grease, but there's no sign of it on that photograph.

"4mm." was actually the 3.81mm. DAT cassette. Evidently nothing came of this because DAT was never used for video.

That's where my old Steenbeck castors went- onto a home-made studio trolley I made out of a folding camping kitchen unit and a piece of chipboard. The Chinese sellers tend to rate castors by the total weight carried on all 4 castors, not singly, so watch out for that. Anyway a ridged concrete floor did for mine. The replacements are actually Turkish and I can move the Steenbeck with one hand now. Move. Not lift.

Sounds like Moviola had a good salesman in NZ lol. No just an idea based on observation and how often they get mentioned. But Steenbeck's 1990 brochure does say that they had made 25,000 up to then. The electronic redesign in the late 70s (most of the -01 models) did make the machines more capable, but there are dozens of ICs. I don't know what it did to the reliability, my '00 (January 1973) is the 1965 discrete-component design. Before that they used valves and 3-phase. When I worked on weapons trials from 88-91 we used a 2-plate Schmid and a 4-plate popped up here (in Torquay, IIRC) a while back. All the other flatbed are essentially copies of the Steenbeck- they really did invent the flatbed. From the start they had a single motor, all the others I believe had multiple motors with that complexity. I think of all the rest only KEM got it right. I don't think it's snobbery, it's just a question of survival in numbers. The relative simplicity has a lot to do with that- the only real impediment to a Steenbeck's survival is the price of timing belts. The only parts I've really had to renew have been resistors and capacitors.

CT scanning still uses X-rays.

Yes, 8 perf horizontal, a similar size to the 35mm. still frame. In fact a lot of stop-motion used to be shot on Nikons with a long-roll film back. Temple of Doom is a famous one. It was then extracted to ordinary 35mm. of course. Presumably this is one reason a lot of VV cameras ended up with Nikkor mounts.

Flatbed Moviolas seem to me to have been a minor item for the company, almost an afterthought because they needed to have the option in their product range. I don't think they were very well thought of. They certainly don't seem as well designed or engineered. There's a reason 'Steenbeck' became a generic term- they probably accounted for 90 out of 100 flatbeds. Of the rest, 7 were KEMs and the other 3, maybe a Cinemonta, a Schmid and a Moviola. I don't think Daniel is looking to acquire one.

Working out a putative hourly rate I looked up the Texas minimum wage. Shocking.

Well, most if not all dialogue is looped, so it's probably not essential. As long as the talent can actually hear themselves lol.

Witness the not-so-infrequent posts on here about how to move one. The 4-plate will just wheel through a UK door with the top hinged up but a 6-plate is a dismantling job. I bought new large castors for mine after a rough floor trashed cheap Chinese ones. Starting at about 125kg, it takes a few beefy grips to lift one.