35/70 mm Floating Hub Reels

[Paul Finn]

Is anyone using the Goldberg floating hub reels for 35mm or 70mm film? If so, do you lubricate the hubs, and if so with what?

Thank you, Paul Finn

[Tj Hopland]

I always would just try and keep em clean. Clean em with something that evaporates quickly and maybe some compressed air. If it hasn't been done in a while it may take several cycles to get it all flushed out. Dirt or other contamination is probably what is making them stick so even if you used a lubricant that was safe around film (like Film Guard?) its going to loosen the crud and that will end up on the film.

The projector usually doesn't wear them but if someone liked to run their rewind at 11 all the time you could get some wear especially if they were run dirty or someone tried lube which just makes the dirt stick better. One site you could hear the poor hub screaming from the auditorium. When the reel emptied the clutch would stop the hub before the flanges and remember how fast it was going with the full 6000' diameter still running at 11 on the power end...... Sounded like someone landed something turbine powered in the parking lot that was spinning down. It was a common booth twin with only one rewind so you got to hear it at least twice per show.

[Steve Guttag]

The factory lubricant has been a clear grease...something akin to Super Lube. I haven't found that they need much, over time. It is rare for them to spin fast as the point of the floating hub is to reduce mass on startup.

[Ryan Gallagher]

Maintenance and cleaning aside. It really depends on your film handling and projection standards relative to if you have a soft start on your motors or not. Most of this is collective wisdom I have gathered from Brad or others here, in an effort to improve our film handling practices...

If you have a soft/VFD start and well maintained/tensioned clutches, the floating hubs don’t really gain you much anymore, and seem to be more prone to damage or shoddy manufacturing.

The main thing to watch out for is cores that are out of round, dented, or just not rotating on center. Sheet metal reels seem particularly prone to these issues, as well as sharp nicks on flanges that need to be buffed out (but never buff one out on a reel housing film, metal dust is probably the worst kind of dust to have near a film). If you see the core wind of film moving all over the place or jumping up and down on your rewind bench, that reel should effectively be retired from ending up on a projector.

We formerly used many floaters here for 70mm, but we’ve now replaced that stock with Film-Tech plastic reels, ( https://store.film-tech.com/film-pro...els-and-cases/ ), which weigh less overall and seem to have much better manufacturing tolerances. We still have the others but only deploy them as take-up for inspections, leaving them tails out until the good reels are available to load up. The film-tech ones generally run much better in our experience, but you do have to be mindful they are plastic and take care of their flanges and axels... avoid auto-stops on rewind machines etc.

Another factor is their hub diameter. Most goldberg floaters I have seen are 5" hubs. With 70mm especially, it is better advised these days to run 8" hubs for tension management and film care reasons, any 70mm you come across is essentially an archive object. We still run production release prints on 35mm on cast Goldberg 15" house reels with 5" cores, but have done a lot of triage in our inventory to restrict ourselves to the 10 best condition ones. Getting a set of Film-Tech 35mm reels is in the plans too, but right now they only offer 24" ones, which may or may not work for your setup as is.

As an aside. I "think" you can still buy "new" reels from Goldberg via dealers, though I have no knowledge of which styles they still manufacture... if anyone knows that and approximate pricing I'd be very curious. The film-tech reels were cheaper than "most" unknown condition used Goldbergs, so it was kinda a no brainer. But I never did learn what their contemporary pricing is exactly.

Edit, Goldberg did/does make 8" core floaters or larger, we just never had any in our booth. 36" floating reels had even larger cores!

[Tj Hopland]

How would you go about applying something like super lube to a typical assembled reel? Never tried but could you heat it to liquid to get it down where it needed to be and then will it stiffen back up when it cools? Or does the heat change it? Seems like I would have had to have a tube of the stuff in a hot car at some point and I don't remember ending up with a tube of liquid but I never really used the stuff till getting near the end of film when someone started supplying it as Century lube.

The lube attempts I had seen I'm sure were likely projector oil and usually a huge mess so that's how I arrived on cleaning and they seemed to do their job just fine again when clean, at least on the projector. I wonder if they still have the repair kits with those special bolts? Its been at least 30 years since I have even thought about ordering one. I remember those bolts being pretty expensive, ya didn't want to loose any or chew up the heads.