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.

The Dead Rabbit

Today my mum told me a very funny story (it may be real):

A family had a very bad dog who kept running away all the time. Their neighbors didn't like the dog therefore.

One day the neighbors were on vacation and the dog was gone once again. So the lady owning the dog called her dog. No answer. After a while she saw the dog running around in their neighbor's garden. It was playing with some fluffy white thing. She walked to her dog shouting. When she came closer she realized that the white thing was the neighbor's pet rabbit. The cage was open.

"Damn!" she thought. This incident will definitely make the relationship with them worse. She took the rabbit which was dead and looked at it. It didn't have any obvious bite marks but was quite dirty. So she had an idea: She cleaned the rabbit with some water and blow dried it. Then she put it back into the cage and closed the door. It almost looked like the rabbit had died on its own.

A few days later the neighbors came back. They didn't say anything. While the lady was walking her dog on the street another neighbor told her: "Did you hear the latest story? Our neighbor's rabbit had died before they went on vacation. So they buried it. But after they returned the rabbit was back in it's cage and it looked cleaner than before."

I actually found the same story on the internet later.