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Manny, for putting trailers on 1" cores, we use a vertical tightwind attachment on our HFC PR-1A rewind. It's basically a piece of 1" brass bar-stock bolted to the rewinder (between the reel and the body) that sticks straight up, and then a roller attaches to the top. I think there's a picture in the Christy's Editorial catalog.

Anyhow, even if you have a non-HFC rewind, you could probably add a similar attachment easily.

In the Los Angeles area, every booth I worked in the 1950s and early 1960s had either some form of "paddle" sound changeover arrangement utilizing a horizontal control rod mechanically linking each projector position to a sound control box on the wall (that functioned as Daryl described except that we used photoelectric tubes back then), or a separate sound control box at each projector position. Most booths had an electrical wireway continuous across the front wall equipped, at each projector station, with three-way motor switches for each projector, a changeover pushbutton station (press the upper white button to open the adjacent projector's electric dowser and close the other projector's electric dowser, or press the bottom black button to do the reverse), along with curtain motor switches and curtain warmer and house light dimmer control switches. Of course, a few older houses had rheostatic dimmers above the booth ceiling, with dimmer operating handles at each projector position lined up above the observation ports.

The biggest challenge in those days was to seamlessly intregrate the non-synch music source.

I never even knew about changeover foot pedal switches until some years back when Frank Angel posted pictures of one of his large outdoor park screening set-ups. Then, when I bought a DVD of "The Projectionist," there was Chuck McCann stomping on a footpedal to effect the changeover!

This is certainly an example of "booth regionalism."

The simple solution to this is to use the manual dowser on the lamphouse, if it has one that works, to dows the light. Then open it after the numbers go thru for the picture change over.

At one point when Cinemark was changing over to a new booth package. they wanted it to be Christie consoles, simpl;ex projectors and I belive Christie platters. But christie would not cut them any breaks in price unless they bought the full package.

As pointed out, independent pic and sound change-over afford flexibility; for subrun and retrospective operations, this is not a convenience but a real must. I can't count the number of prints that have had the last word or the final chord of music living on the very last few seconds of the outgoing reel. If you make a change-over with picture and sound locked together, you have only two choices, both unacceptable. Either you make the change-over at the last frame of the picture so the image change-over on the screen is seamless and thus miss that last very important second of sound on the outgoing soundtrack, or you allow that sound to play and allow the screen to go black. On the other hand, if you have the ability to make independent change-over for picture and sound, then you can make the picture change-over and wait for the last second of sound to play before you make the sound change-over. This becomes a real presentation issue in retrospective houses that get prints where years of make-up and breakdown have chewed up countless frames and the tails and heads. In the custom change-over switching configuration in our Whitman Theatre, it is selectable -- you can choose to have pix and sound switch 1) simultaniously by the footswitch, 2) independently by footswitch and pushbutton or 3) simultanious and automatically by a timer that times out the 9.5 seconds after the motor switch is activated.

In the one theatre where I work that had a single change-over switch, I broke it apart and added a separate switch for sound. Also added a "kill" switch that will allow both picture and sound on both projectors to shut off in case of a missed cue. The way the original switching originally was set up, all you could do was switch back to the outgoing projector, which of course was playing leader gack. A kill switch allows the projectionist to kill everything until the incoming projector had passed leader and was at picture (also allowing him wipe a bit of that egg off his face).

I would love a foot pedal for the Kelmar rewind instead of the hand operated speed control. Anyone know if Kelmar makes a conversion kit of some kind so a foot pedal controller can be retrofited on their standard control unit?

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