A reengineered Super 8 cartridge, built from the ground up to be loaded with your own film. No cracking open a vintage original, no breaking factory welds to get inside one. A purpose-made loop cassette for the LOOP8 player: load it, play it, reload it.
FDM-printed test piece, not a finished part: this is rapid prototyping, the roughest possible look at where the Cart is headed. Final photos and renders go here once there's something closer to done. In the meantime, the journal has the ongoing build story.
The original cartridge was never meant to be opened: glued or solvent-welded shut, with a heat-staked drive gear and no path to service a worn part. The Cart keeps the same external format, the same ecosystem, but rebuilds the inside around three requirements: easy assembly, real serviceability, and the ability to swap film stock in and out.
Every guide and roller is tapered to keep contact on the edges of the film, never the emulsion or acetate side within the image area itself.
No solvent welds. A worn part gets replaced, not thrown away with the whole cartridge.
Buy a blank cartridge and load your own Super 8 film, or send us a film and we'll load it for you.
A mini size for very short loops, and a double-length size for longer ones, alongside the standard length.
First prototypes are running today on an FDM printer: fast and rough, good for testing fit and function, not a preview of final material or finish. The likely next steps are SLA resin, then injection molding if volume justifies it, but that path isn't locked in yet. This sits behind the Level 1 player, which is the near-term priority and the thing actually shipping. There's no timeline for the Cart yet. The research behind it, teardowns of original cartridges across different manufacturers, an orthographic scanner built specifically to capture their geometry, and a running list of what actually wears out over fifty years, is documented as it happens in the journal.