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I had that “Brand New” Elmo ST-800 at home. From the outside it really did look brand new, but then again you and I know that’s never the whole story with these. Of course, it really wasn’t new in a lot of ways. Yes, the guides had seen less than 50 feet of film that very first day at the Elmo factory and they were still perfect and the motor brushes were 100%, but everything this machine was made of was something well into human middle age! Those “new” motor brushes were likely sitting on a commutator with half a lifetime’s worth of oxidation, for example. When it last ran, I was a teenager. By the time I got it, I was raising one!
It’s hard to put this one in a category, really. It wasn’t a “used” projector, since it had never been sold. Based on time, it sure wasn’t a “new” projector, either. Maybe the best description is “forgotten”. (There is plenty of “new” stuff in the Pyramids…)
The things we build don’t care what we want them to be: that shiny new Rolls Royce standing in the showroom doesn’t want to be a premium luxury car, it “wants” to decompose back into the rust it existed as for millennia! Anything in my “new” projector that could degrade had over 40 years to do its work. All that “newness” might burn up in milliseconds if I was foolish enough to just plug it in, so it was time to dig in, see what was going on in there, maybe clear out some cobwebs!
The differences between this machine and every used Elmo I’d ever had started to show up as soon as I applied a screwdriver to those two cover screws. As I turned them, they just felt…funny. I thought maybe the brackets had threaded inserts (not true) and they were spinning loose in the brackets (also not true). I was emotionally preparing myself to drill the screws out (not nice…loads of new looking paint to damage!), but I kept turning them and they came out naturally. It turns out that Elmo installed lock washers on the cover screws, and basically every owner ever since has tossed them!
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One of the classic problems that comes up on this forum is “I took the back off my machine, and now my speaker doesn’t work!”. The classic reply we often give is “Did you plug the speaker connection back in?”. Now, there is very little that we know here that a lot of people in the business didn’t know decades ago. I’m guessing they had a rash of machines fail the sound test, so they added a step of adding a cable tie around that connection just to make sure.
Now, let’s take a look at the belts.
The belt between the motor and the shutter looks fine:
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-it was basically everywhere! -thick, tarry goo! (I bet the guy who wrote The Blob got the idea from fixing old movie projectors!)
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I was cleaning belt goo at the dining room table and I got a smudge on the tablecloth! I thought I would artfully blend it into the pattern: a nice thick stem for the closest flower! I was generally pleased with my work, and glad I had art classes when I was in elementary school! (Given a little mustard and ketchup I could have started a whole new flower!)
-yet my wife busted me within maybe 15 minutes: cost me a new tablecloth! (Some people just don’t appreciate art!)
Suffice it to say, I ordered a new set of belts!
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Now here’s something that surprised me a little. That one-way wheel/thingy that allows the rear reel to freewheel during rewind often develops cracks in the nylon. I’ve always thought it was from the stress of years of operation, but here we have it on a machine that’s operated maybe 5 minutes including none within our century! I guess the nylon outer part is just not up to the stress of having that brass hub press-fit inside it. Still, I've run on worse ones than this, so I'm leaving it alone.
I manipulated the motor and the film transport, nothing was frozen up. The lubricants were as dry as the Sahara, so I lubed the gears including all of those up inside the reel arms.
The inside of the machine was spotlessly clean: no cobwebs! (...just some Goo!)
-yet, this was all just prelude: the point here is not to clean house, but take a machine that hadn’t ever really done what it was meant to do and finally let it have its day. The time for it to meet electric power again was finally at hand!
(Will it even “remember”?!)
-Stay Tuned!
It’s hard to put this one in a category, really. It wasn’t a “used” projector, since it had never been sold. Based on time, it sure wasn’t a “new” projector, either. Maybe the best description is “forgotten”. (There is plenty of “new” stuff in the Pyramids…)
The things we build don’t care what we want them to be: that shiny new Rolls Royce standing in the showroom doesn’t want to be a premium luxury car, it “wants” to decompose back into the rust it existed as for millennia! Anything in my “new” projector that could degrade had over 40 years to do its work. All that “newness” might burn up in milliseconds if I was foolish enough to just plug it in, so it was time to dig in, see what was going on in there, maybe clear out some cobwebs!
The differences between this machine and every used Elmo I’d ever had started to show up as soon as I applied a screwdriver to those two cover screws. As I turned them, they just felt…funny. I thought maybe the brackets had threaded inserts (not true) and they were spinning loose in the brackets (also not true). I was emotionally preparing myself to drill the screws out (not nice…loads of new looking paint to damage!), but I kept turning them and they came out naturally. It turns out that Elmo installed lock washers on the cover screws, and basically every owner ever since has tossed them!
b
One of the classic problems that comes up on this forum is “I took the back off my machine, and now my speaker doesn’t work!”. The classic reply we often give is “Did you plug the speaker connection back in?”. Now, there is very little that we know here that a lot of people in the business didn’t know decades ago. I’m guessing they had a rash of machines fail the sound test, so they added a step of adding a cable tie around that connection just to make sure.
Now, let’s take a look at the belts.
The belt between the motor and the shutter looks fine:
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-but where is my long belt?
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-Ohhhhhhhh! (No surprise here, I guess!)
b
-it was basically everywhere! -thick, tarry goo! (I bet the guy who wrote The Blob got the idea from fixing old movie projectors!)
b
I was cleaning belt goo at the dining room table and I got a smudge on the tablecloth! I thought I would artfully blend it into the pattern: a nice thick stem for the closest flower! I was generally pleased with my work, and glad I had art classes when I was in elementary school! (Given a little mustard and ketchup I could have started a whole new flower!)
-yet my wife busted me within maybe 15 minutes: cost me a new tablecloth! (Some people just don’t appreciate art!)
Suffice it to say, I ordered a new set of belts!
b
Now here’s something that surprised me a little. That one-way wheel/thingy that allows the rear reel to freewheel during rewind often develops cracks in the nylon. I’ve always thought it was from the stress of years of operation, but here we have it on a machine that’s operated maybe 5 minutes including none within our century! I guess the nylon outer part is just not up to the stress of having that brass hub press-fit inside it. Still, I've run on worse ones than this, so I'm leaving it alone.
I manipulated the motor and the film transport, nothing was frozen up. The lubricants were as dry as the Sahara, so I lubed the gears including all of those up inside the reel arms.
The inside of the machine was spotlessly clean: no cobwebs! (...just some Goo!)
-yet, this was all just prelude: the point here is not to clean house, but take a machine that hadn’t ever really done what it was meant to do and finally let it have its day. The time for it to meet electric power again was finally at hand!
(Will it even “remember”?!)
-Stay Tuned!
Like you I'm all for simplicity. I only wish it had a brighter bulb...it would then be prominently perched with my permanent setup projectors.
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