Bell & Howell 57U Filmo Master 16mm Projector

Long ago in a distant land called Michigan, our young hero set forth to bring back life to an ancient mechanism… and then got distracted for a couple of years. Maybe more than a couple of years.

This project is simple enough to explain: I’ve got a broken vintage 16mm film projector, and I would like to fix it. Ideally I want to repair a few things: replace all of the electrical wiring, get the main lightbulb and secondary lightbulb working again, and make at least an honest attempt at fixing the motor so the projector can run film again properly. If all that goes well then I’ll finally see what’s on the reels of film that I found inside the projector’s case way back when.

Do I know anything about electrical wiring or refurbishing vintage film projectors? Nope not a thing, but by golly I’ve at least got gumption and a bit of can do attitude! Fingers crossed I don’t start any (more) electrical fires.

The tangled mass of metallic guts and faulty wiring you see before you used to look a lot like a projector. I mean it still kind of does now, but it used to look look a lot more like one when I first found this thing. I’m not sure exactly when I found this projector, it was either shortly before or shortly after moving to Michigan. I’m a sucker for any kind of garage/tag/estate sale, so when I noticed one across the street from my mother’s house I had no choice but to pop in.

Wouldn’t you know it, turns out the woman whose estate sale I’d stumbled into had lived a pretty extraordinary life judging by the things she had left behind. I don’t have any concrete evidence but I suspect she may have been a scholar or involved in academia somehow given how close she lived to the university nearby. Plus there were all kind of antique books, travel guides, and other signs of a curious mind scattered throughout the place. I ended up bringing home a stack of books too (mostly antique travel guides for faroff places, even a few for countries that no longer existed like Ceylon and Burma along with a guide to traveling via steamship from the early 1900s).

But I digress, back to the projector. There it was, tucked away in a corner of the house’s basement: a 16mm Bell & Howell Filmo S film projector, still in the original carrying case along with the manual, an oil can, a couple of spare bulbs, and some film reels. From the outside it seemed to be in immaculate condition, the exterior metal pieces still all shiny and chrome. So I was determined to get it running so I could find out what was on these film reels myself. I lugged the projector back across the street, plugged it in, and waited. It slowly whirred to life, light shining out of the front, hummed and clicked for about five seconds, and then a huge plume of smoke burst out of the motor compartment.

After the smoke cleared I gave the projector a more thorough inspection, and while the exterior was pristine there were a few glaring issues in the guts: the electrical cables were all in horrible shape, the motor was somewhat corroded and one of its wires had broken, and whole interior compartment needed a pretty thorough cleaning. But after that a lot of life happened and I wouldn’t really start working on this refurbishment project until a few years later.

While I don’t know much about putting together vintage film projectors, I do know enough about tearing s*!t apart to get by. So I unscrewed all the screws, pulled apart the projector body sections, and found myself a nice pile of ratty dirty electrical wires.

In the interest of not electrocuting myself and not lighting anything on fire and not spend an inordinate amount of time trying to replicate the wiring paths I mapped out all of the electrical connections before proceeding and drew up a quick schematic.

Once that was done I disconnected all the wiring and separated out all the different components. I gave it a quick polish and blast of canned air to clear out some dust, otherwise almost everything was in immaculate shape besides the wiring (probably because most of the components were meta).

The only other section that was in slightly-rough shape was the motor. I hadn't fully removed the motor from its casing, but I could see a fair amount of corrosion/degradation in the nooks and crannies, plus one of the electrical wires connecting it to the rest of the projector had already broken from wear. So I'm not totally sure if I'll be able to rebuild the motor, but maybe once I pull apart the rest of it I'll have a better idea of the difficulty.

That part wasn't so bad right? Now all I have to do is replace the wiring, rebuild the projector, and see if I can get it working again or if I just completely killed the whole thing.

Spoiler Alert: I may have started a teeny tiny electrical fire. Whoopsy Daisy!

said previously-on-fire projector

soon-to-be-on-fire projector

But in my defense, the fire was really small and went out almost immediately. Plus it worked! Only for about five seconds but it worked!

I bought some new electrical wiring, reconnected everything based off of the schematic I'd made except the motor which I'll save for another day, and gave it a try. So the good news is that the lights came on, which means I had the correct pathways for everything. The bad news is that after a few seconds there was a crackle and a plume of smoke along with a little bit of flame that flashed out of the casing section that housed the wiring connections.

Luckily nothing important was damaged and I almost immediately realized my mistake as I was cleaning up the carbonized wire and destroyed wiring inside the projector. If it wasn't already obvious from reading this site, I am a goober. And in my goobery ways, I bought the completely wrong gauge of wire for the amount of electricity this projector requires, which explains why it worked but burst into flames after a few seconds since the wire didn't have enough capacity.

But I ordered the correct gauge of wire and will hopefully be reporting back soon with some working projector lights!