Here's the bad part. Raising the intermittent as high as possible will create an oddball size loop that will slap violently and run LOOOOUD! ...but the picture is more steady.

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Everything in the gate is perfectly aligned, and when I swap the entire gate assemblies with another projector, the problem does NOT follow the gate! Any ideas? I'm out.

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How old are your machines? The older Christies were actually pretty darned good. What most people are complaining about on this forum is their current line of "goods".

I've ran the geared versions of their P35 and they were very nice. I also ran one of the first gearless machines for a demo (6 months) and the picture was as steady as our Simplex XLs. About 5 years ago I installed a set of them at a 10 screen and those are still running smooth today. HOWEVER, anything much newer than 5 years seem to be junk. I haven't been following Christie's changes "too" closely, but I do know that theater 5 years ago had the older style sounddrum where the edges were raised (so the picture didn't touch the drum) and the newer ones have a sounddrum like the Centurys. (Personally I always liked the idea of the picture not coming into contact with the drum.) I can't honestly say if you have the older style sounddrum if that is a good machine or not, because I don't know when the date was they #1 changed over to the new drum and #2 when they turned to crap.

I would be very interested to know how old your machines are (from manufacture, not when you purchased them), which type of sound drum it has, if they are indeed the "gearless" type and if you run collector's prints on them (mostly being triacetate prints) or if yours are in a public theater running polyestar shows daily. The current Christies run triacetate pretty well, but polyestar on them is a joke. Also, what make/model lamphouse (or a pedestal) is this mounted to? One engineer told me once that a current Christie projector will perform decently on a different brand of lamphouse as it had something to do with the actual mount on the Christie console that was weak. I don't know as I've never tried.

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They have the raised edge sounddrums, so nowhere does the image surface come into contact with anything except film. They are belt drives and I use them only at home [all our Telluride Film Festival theatres, seven in all, run Centurys (3) and Brenkerts (4)(!!!)]. Now these don't have the motorized turret or aperture, which is just fine.

The Cristies have custom bases setup for 5000-6000' reels and used to have the film come over the top on rollers that made the film take two 90° turns. This was too much torque on a number of old glue splices so I put some Simplex reel arms on for a straight film shot to the takeup reel. (Joe, the takeup is no longer a mangle problem.)

Most of the film I run is acetate and some goes back close to 50 years. I have some new poly stuff but except for the sound of it going thru the gate, it seems to run just fine. I ran a poly British release print of 12 Monkeys the other night and had no problem.

Do you want the regular manual or the over-an-inch-thick-"Bible" manual? If there is enough interest, I will see about scanning that sucker in and making it available. The regular manual Christie provides isn't worth the paper it is printed on. There is hardly any part numbers or anything in there at all.