It was a rare privilege to explore and repair this 20th Century-Fox Cine Simplex 35mm production camera. The engineering of this camera is extraordinary and it is disappointing that it never became as ubiquitous as the Mitchell BNC. The level of thought that went into all aspects of the design and function of this camera …
The Twentieth Century-Fox Cine Simplex camera represented a revolutionary change in the design and intended use of a studio sound production camera. From its inception, this camera was designed specifically to be sound silent without the added size and weight of a blimp housing. To achieve this, the camera’s designers rethought everything about how the …
The camera is all back together and, as you’ll see in the video, it is amazingly quiet. I hope you will forgive the road noise in the background, but frankly I just couldn’t drag the camera back upstairs where it is quieter. At the end of the video is a demonstration of the unique rackover …
My disappointment was palpable, though not unexpected, when I turned the camera on for the first time and heard the terrible sound of the shutter scraping against the innards of the camera. The journey now returned to taking the camera apart again, and removing the camera from the rackover cradle so I could get to …
After powering up and running the camera for only a few seconds, I noticed that the camera was producing a horrible scraping noise. The noise was very similar to what you get on a Mitchell camera when the shutter blades scrape against the forward-most light trap. This, unfortunately, was a sign that I needed to …
Happy new year everyone! A brief progress report on the Freehead for this first Friday of the new year: It’s as finished as I have time to work on it. Because this project is so interesting, it has gone way over the time I had set aside to finish it. There is still some air …
One final check in before we take a few days off for the holidays. The Fox Freehead is now about 90% repaired. I have been working on the frozen tilt axis for the last week; it is another remarkable piece of engineering. The tilt axis is made up of a two-part casting that houses the …
Success! Thanks to the folks at Jim’s Tap Extraction Service in Torrance, CA, the broken hardened screws were EDMed out of the casting of the Fox Freehead! Also, at the 11th hour yesterday, the grease I was recommended finally arrived. In the meantime, I went on a search to see if the original ¼-20 fillister …
I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday, ours was nice and restful. Now that we’re back, I have spent the week hunting everywhere for a suitable replacement grease to finish my work on the Freehead. According to the camera manual, the original grease used in the hydraulic damper for the Freehead was water pump …
Just a quick update on the progress on the Fox Freehead before we break for Thanksgiving. I have spent most of the week up to my elbows in various types of grease, trying to clean all of the orifices and metering valves that control the drag on the pan axis. This is proving to be …
A Quick Update on the Fox Freehead Before Thanksgiving Read More »
