Strand Volunteers Mike and Whitney Richardson inventoried pieces and parts in from the Strand.  Mike is a former cinetech and understands these types of things.  Below is his discussion of what he found:

Keep It Simplex Silly

If my research is correct, thank you John Cannon, Simplex (The International Projector Corporation) began its production of projector heads in 1909.  In 1916, after Patent on July 11^th, it was outputting its Standard. 1925 saw the formation of the International Projector Corporation from mergers including the Acme Motion Picture Projector Company, the Super came along in ’28, E-7 in ’39, and X-L in ’49.  The X-L line gave way to the Simplex 35’s around 1981.

http://www.cinephoto.co.uk/complete_projectionist_1949_simplex_e7_projector_mech.htm

http://www.darrell.org/SSbody.html

Strand Theatre has one X-L (complete with sound reproducer [sound head]), three E-7’s, two Supers, two other Simplexes, and three unmarked projectors (one having the International Projector Corporation tag in the gearbox). The others are undoubtedly Simplex due to the similarities and abundance of spare new Simplex projector head parts still in their little special made printed manufactured cardboard boxes (Constant Velocity [CV] sprockets having that loving extra touch of a script Simplex stamping between the teeth lands).

Until now, I only ever serviced operating X-L’s as far as Simplexes go.  Today, Saturday 14 November 2009, I handled history that may well have been some of the first projector heads the company built.  What an honor.

My wife Whitney and I arrived with David and started our long promised inventory of the cinema equipment warehoused recently for Strand Theatre by that fine bunch of volunteers.  We got started around 10 AM and it took us until 3 PM and we barely got done.  We removed all the projection equipment tossed the obvious trash, inventoried, digitally photographed (Whitney did), categorized and put it all back on pallets keeping like equipment together and placed the pallets back keeping like equipped pallets together.  I oriented the pictures, renamed them, burned them to discs, and set about writing this missive.

Outside of the projector heads we found power supplies (one Kni-Tron), Carbon-Arc lamp houses (a Strong Excelite 135 and a couple Moguls), A tubed RCA Amp, A Dolby cinema sound processor, a box of 11 mm Carbons, three good reflectors, and oodles of spare new Simplex parts as mentioned previously (to include drive and driven gears of plastic, nylon, fiber, brass [from Edward H Wolk Company, still new in their printed cardboard boxes]), and steel.

Thank you for the honor to handle and continue in my knowledge of cinema equipment.  And from what I understand, there’s more in the attic.

Mike Richardson