Through a bit of horsetrading, I picked up an Aaton LTR-54 super-16 camera package. It was professionally serviced in April. Only it didn’t come with a manual.
When I run the dummy roll through it, it makes one of three sounds: A clacking, like my Eclair NPR makes when the loop is lost; a sprockety sound, which I would think of as normal in a camera that isn’t supposed to be silent (in retrospect, it sounds a bit like a super-8), and silent running.
When I opened the magazine, the right (take-up) side showed two sprocketed wheels, two rollers, and the take-up spool. The film did not go through the lower sprocket. (The guy I got the camera from bought it in April and never shot with it, since he’s really a 35mm guy.) That couldn’t be right; else why the lower sprocket? When run this way, the camera made the ‘super-8’ sound. So I put the film through the sproket and gtried again. This time it made the ‘loop lost’ sound. I fiddled with the loop and it ran silently.
Only I can’t get it to run silently every time. I’m pretty sure the problem is with the loop. In the Éclair and in an Arri SR2 it’s pretty obvious how to set the loop. But then, I had manuals. Unfortunatly my Aaton manuals are very inaccessable at the moment. The NPR requires counting off 14 frames over the pressure plate, pressing down the middle, and pushing the excess into the magazine. So how do I consistently set the loop on an Aaton LTR-54?