In my last post, I talked about the soundproofing material I found inside the Fox Cine-Simplex camera. As I dig deeper, I am more and more impressed with the lengths the designers went to in their efforts to isolate all of the moving parts from the body of the camera to make it as quiet as possible. Three things in particular struck me during this part of the cleaning process: how the motor mounts and couples to the camera along with the level of isolation between the motor mount and the camera and rackover sections; the way in which the shutter shaft is isolated from both the camera body and the rackover base; and the sound dampening material mounted to the inside of the turret.
All of these design choices were implemented to keep the noise and vibration of the mechanisms inside the camera box as much as possible. I will know better how successful they were when I am at the point where I can actually run the camera. As an interesting side note, in one of the collections of lenses I acquired some time ago, I came across an Astro Berlin Pan Tachar 100mm lens in the Cine Simplex mount. It’s not a Bausch & Lomb, but it completes the set that this camera originally had.
