ECN Forum Forums Photo Discussion Forums Electrical Nostalgia Avalon Theatre

The island is served by So. California Edison, with a generating plant on the island. I believe there is not a cable link to the mainland.

They have had a few whole-island outages in the past.

Water usage is, oddly enough, a big issue out there. Fresh water is scarce, so all public buildings and some (most?) homes have separate salt-water systems for toilets!

Call me crazy (or really well sighted) for pointing this out, in pic 8, farthest to the right, is that an old BUSS cartridge fuse? I see a fair few of them in there between the 2 posts.

Waxed cotton cord was the usual material for cable lacing. Usually some kind of fungicidal wax, at least in military/telco gear.

If you want to practice the skill, or restore older gear, dental floss is a good, easily available substitute. Instructions in any old edition of the ARRL handbook or other old electronics books.

Bumped due to the "Great Xenon Power Supply Caper" thread..

I used to teach my students how to lace using waxed cotton. It sorts the men out from the boys, shows who has the temprament to do a neat job. Several used to give up in the first two weeks becouse of it those who stuck with it were always a higher caliber student.

I myself was trained by old brittish post office engineers so everything had to be exact. It makes fault finding so much easier when the cable it neat and tidy

Kenny

Great photos and descriptions - thanks for sharing them!

This page has some info about the projectionist's work in theaters of that era: http://www.film-center.com/gb2.html

Albert: First off, welcome to ECN!!

And thank you for the compliment and the link!

I got my start in the business of projection and projection engineering in Tucson, Az. back in 1982. I was working at the Air Force Base theatre, and had to handle most aspects of repairs and upkeep as well as run the films. (Army-Air Force Exchange Service, or AAFES) had only one engineer for the entire Western United States.

And film projectors are law-abiding citizens of a fellow named Murphy, and would ALWAYS fail with a full house on a Friday or Saturday night. So one has to be saavy to keep the show on no matter what.

You'll find many helpful people here at ECN, on any number of topics, so feel free to browse and join in anytime!

A former class mate of mine came to Vienna some time in the 80s and the first place he worked at still had arc projection lamps! He says it was the last theatre in Vienna to switch over to Xenon lamps.

Albert: Welcome to ECN, and thanks for the link you posted. That sure brings back some memories for me! I used to work as a theater projectionist, and trained others to do this work. One of the hardest things I ever attempted was to teach them to draw the carbons apart to extinguish the arc BEFORE opening the arc switch on the projector - the switch sparks and arcs so much less that way (read "longer switch life"). I left the business just before the advent of xenon lamps and platter systems, so I spent a great deal of time trimming carbons, pre-cooking hundreds or thousands of them in the lamphouses just prior to use, changing brushes in the generators, testing and replacing amplifier tubes, performing mechanical maintenance on two glorious vintage Brenkert projectors with "Enarc" lamps, and other tasks far too numerous to mention.

In many ways, I really miss those days .

Mike (mamills)

A lot of careful design and construction went into these old units.

I don't know about these days, but how to lace-up a wiring loom with waxed cotton was still on the PO/BT training schedule in the mid-1980s.