Semi-Easy

Well loyal readers it seems some things can be semi-easy. I've learnt today that, although they are basically Fox holes (no real problem) the pitch between the perforations on 28mm and 35mm film is the same. This means we can fix the Premier! All we have to do is get our guest electro-mechanical genius to chop the end off a small 35mm sprocket, level the shaft so that the width of the sprocket is 28mm rather than 35mm, reattach the end, file away the excess pins on one side, find a new handle to fit to the shaft for the racking and deal with any other unforseen problems once we've got that far. Rather him than me!

(Edit: I have since spoken to our genius and it looks like there are no 35mm sprockets small enough for the job so it looks like he'll have to machine one from scratch after all, nothing's ever f**king easy!)

Speaking of removing pins I love tape splicers. I've been using one in my work that we had lying around, a fair splicer but the blades are a bit blunt so the tape doesn't always cut cleanly. Well I finally got off my backside today and dug around in our splicer box and found a better one. Then, spurred on by the delight at finding one with decent blades, I decided to dismantle it and remove the stupid guide pins at the ends (such a pain in the behind when dealing with shrunken film). Actually this was genuinely semi-easy! It made repairing the tears caused by the gummy splices in the latest film so much easier. Of course, as I've mentioned before, it's extremely annoying that the, erm, fool who owned the films before used standard sellotape to fix the breaks and now I'm having to deal with all the resultant crap rather than the film simply unspooling nice and easily onto the cores but, of course, this is because

Nothing's ever f**king easy!