Inappropriate splicing materials

[David Strelitz]

Over the past 30 + years of offering video production services, including mainly domestic Telecine services, I have had reels of film with sections "stuck" together with a variety of "fixings" ranging from black fabric insulation tape, Sellotape, 16mm film with staples as splices and never mind super glue, (which has it's fan base) but Epoxy Resin!
Last week I think new heights (or depths) were attained.
A customer's son contacted me regarding a family archive which they wanted transferred to DVD. We had the conversation re the benefits of USB flash drives, but he said his father (well into his 90s) wanted me to do one 200ft reel as a test.
The reel arrived by Special Delivery, the padded envelope opened, containing customer's details and a request to take special care of the film and not damage it etc. I then opened the film case and a cry was heard for miles around of WTF!!!🤬

The 200ft reel of super 8 with dual sound stripe was a mass of bits of brown parcel tape sticking out and plenty more that were present. I estimate 50+ splices made with parcel tape, some just a few inches long, many sections not aligned and the majority had "butterfly wings" sticking up.
I spoke to the customer who denied any knowledge of parcel tape and as I had no desire to spend hours splicing, nor to come up with a cost effective price, it was agreed that the film would be returned.

My only thought was at sometime the reel had been transferred to VHS, the cleaner had a broken down the cement splices and someone just got the brown tape out.

Sad, as I don't like turning work away but sometimes you just have to make an exception.

[Maurice Leakey]

I recently bought a 16mm film which contained many splices which were made by scraping a whole frame, and then, presumably, using too much cement (?) which caused the whole frame to buckle.
I remade them all as I didn't thank they would travel OK through my projector gate, and, possibly cause a problem with the teeth of its sprockets.

[Osi Osgood]

I have heard of 35mm literally being safety pinned together, but wouldn't that really make a mess of the film gate?

[Erik Snel]

I too have had a staple as a splice, talk about ruining your gate for sure. its incredible what people tend to do to their own films.

and along the linesof this subject, i have had a lot of trouble with new 8mm film leader which tends to be wider then 8mm, and especially Noris projectors can't handle it. so after replacing the leader it took a while to figure out why the projector was destroying the film constantly.