A friend of mine brought this Twentieth Century-Fox Cine Simplex Camera to me well over a year ago to see if it could be cleaned up and restored to working condition. I have been busy with many other projects, so I am just now getting to it. The camera appears to have been neglected and improperly stored for some time before he rescued it, so there was some corrosion present on several of the drive components. This looked far worse than it turned out to be, happily. To this point, the camera has been completely disassembled and the movement, the sprocket, the keepers, and all of the major components of the film path have been repaired, cleaned, and lubricated. My focus at the moment is to clean and restore the gear assembly that runs the sprocket, the gear assembly that runs the shutter, and the unique mounting solutions that the engineers chose for these components.
My first assumption when I looked at how things were mounted inside the camera was that everything was mounted on rubber isolation mounts. But I was wrong. The clever solution the engineers found here was to make a sandwich of two steel plates with a piece of thick leather glued between them, and all the components were then mounted to the outside steel plate, isolating them for sound purposes, but being much more rigid than a rubber interface. There is a whole lot more stuff that I will share in the future, but that was the most interesting thing I discovered this past week while I was de-rusting and de-greasing these components. This is another camera that looked far worse that it actually was, and it should be back to shooting film over the next few weeks.
