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I had two full days of maintenance time this week, and after success re-truing our kelmar rewind spindles, among other season start normal maintenance, I decided to tackle our Simplex Reel 8170/8159 arm 35mm spindles.
We have 6 available, in various stages of bent from abuse, and good condition replacements are very VERY hard to find it seems. Long term I want the venue to pony up for Kelmar 35/70 reel arms, but that purchase has not been made yet and summer films are looming.
Happy to report I got all 6 into what I consider much better condition (sub 3 thou runout near the hinge), chasing it any further was proving to have diminishing returns with my methods. Note some had started out worse than the video below, but I had previously reigned a couple in a bit with cruder methods. A good condition reel now looks and spins lovely without much imparted wobble. Small victories.
Before Example:
After Example:
I used a cheap little hammer marketed as a gunsmithing hammer that has interchangable material heads (brass, copper, rubber, plastic... and only used the rubber one). In the end that was probably not needed cause I remembered I had those steel split ring collars I could use to both protect the hinge and give me something to tap on other than the spindle itself.
Once I had determined the bend was not compound, it was just a matter of finding the high point, and gently working it towards true. Figuring out how to mount the indicator and still leave room for swinging a tool was probably the trickiest part.
The only part that felt a little sus was using the reel arm itself as the work holder. A lathe or some sort of turning chuck would have been much preferred. But these simplex arms are pretty bomb proof, I was confident the only movement my puny little hammer was going to impart was in the spindle shaft itself. There are certainly better ways! This approach might have been crazy pants, but sometimes you begrudgingly work with the tools available.
The fact we have variable speed drives helped a lot when visualizing progress. It could have been done reviewing at full speed, but with more manual turning against the clutch to find the high spot.
We have 6 available, in various stages of bent from abuse, and good condition replacements are very VERY hard to find it seems. Long term I want the venue to pony up for Kelmar 35/70 reel arms, but that purchase has not been made yet and summer films are looming.
Happy to report I got all 6 into what I consider much better condition (sub 3 thou runout near the hinge), chasing it any further was proving to have diminishing returns with my methods. Note some had started out worse than the video below, but I had previously reigned a couple in a bit with cruder methods. A good condition reel now looks and spins lovely without much imparted wobble. Small victories.
Before Example:
After Example:
I used a cheap little hammer marketed as a gunsmithing hammer that has interchangable material heads (brass, copper, rubber, plastic... and only used the rubber one). In the end that was probably not needed cause I remembered I had those steel split ring collars I could use to both protect the hinge and give me something to tap on other than the spindle itself.
Once I had determined the bend was not compound, it was just a matter of finding the high point, and gently working it towards true. Figuring out how to mount the indicator and still leave room for swinging a tool was probably the trickiest part.
The only part that felt a little sus was using the reel arm itself as the work holder. A lathe or some sort of turning chuck would have been much preferred. But these simplex arms are pretty bomb proof, I was confident the only movement my puny little hammer was going to impart was in the spindle shaft itself. There are certainly better ways! This approach might have been crazy pants, but sometimes you begrudgingly work with the tools available.
The fact we have variable speed drives helped a lot when visualizing progress. It could have been done reviewing at full speed, but with more manual turning against the clutch to find the high spot.