Reviving an old Eumig R 2000 projector

A few weeks ago I was carrying out the waste when I found something strange in the waste room. First it looked like a television, but when I took a closer look it turned out to be something different. It was a 8mm film projector.

I couldn't resist taking it into my flat and take a closer look. I plugged it into the power plug and turned it on. The lamp was still working and a motor was transporting the non-existent film. But there was some flickering on it's screen.

It must have stood somewhere for ages, so it was quite dusty. I started cleaning it and also opened it's case. It was quite a surprise when I found out that you can flip it's mirror outwards so you can watch movies on both the internal screen as well as the projection on a wall. The only thing it didn't have was sound.

As soon as this day I ordered a 8mm movie on eBay, the cheapest I could find as I just wanted to try it out. A week later I had the movie.

But how to get the movie into the projector? I failed feeding it at first. So I thought: "Maybe I need to rewind it". So I transfered the movie onto another film roll and tried again. I had quite some troubles getting the film through all the rolls and gears inside the projector. But finally I succeeded and had to find out: the movie was upside down. So maybe it was all right the way it was before. I retransfered it to the original film roll and tried another time. This time the projector accepted it and started showing the pictures on the screen. Hurray!!!

Later that day me and my girlfriend made ourselves a movie evening with 5 minutes of film. It was the Max and Moritz movie, part 1. As the projector is a silent one, we played a Ennio Morricone CD in the background. What an amazing experience for a guy who grew up knowing the television only.

As I never intended to watch movies on this device, I had the idea to sell it on eBay later on. But before I did, I came to a flea market and started talking to a dealer there. He said, that a few minutes earlier a guy wanted to buy a projector like mine. Before he could write down my number, that guy came back and I talked to him directly.

A week later that same guy came to visit my flat and took a look at the projector. And he actually bought it. So I sold my projector which didn't cost me anything.

Summing up I avoided that the projector would have been disposed in an inappropriate way, I had some fun playing around with it and I made some money selling it. I wish things like that would happen more often to me.