It’s worth stopping to actually credit the people who built this, roughly half a century ago now. Fitting a real projector mechanism, gating, sprockets, frame control, the same fundamental problems any film projector has to solve, into a mass-produced plastic injection tool is a genuinely hard engineering problem. That’s not a small achievement, and it’s easy to overlook from the outside.
Reverse-engineering it makes that obvious fast. Go through it piece by piece and the rails, the bosses, the offsets, the tolerances all turn out to have real reasons behind them. None of it is arbitrary. It’s a surprisingly involved little mechanism once you actually look closely at what it’s doing.
From the outside, it’s deceptively simple: bright yellow injection-molded ABS, solvent-welded shut, more than a little rough about how you’d even go about opening it. Inside, it’s a tight-tolerance little machine. Reengineering it has been a genuine challenge, and honestly, a lot of fun.