Century rebuild

[Jesse Crooks]

I’m working on a Century SA with an R4 soundhead that were operational when they were decommissioned in the 2010s. I was hoping someone might be able to answer a few questions:

It’s missing the takeup pulley-gear assembly (it does have the fiber gear), but I have an R3 in storage that has one. Are these interchangeable? The manuals I have indicate a different part number for the stud, but the same part number for the pulley-gear itself.

What's the rule of thumb for setting the stop for the damper arms? When I received it the upper arm was making contact with the sound drum so I backed it of until it cleared it, but I wasn't sure how far to set it.

So far I found one bearing that was totally shot on the the adjusting arm. It wore a very small groove into the shaft (only on the operator side, not the full width of the bearing) and left some discoloration that I assume to be burnishing from the heat of the inner race spinning on the shaft. Should I be concerned about the condition of the shaft, or just replace the bearing? I'm currently thinking I may as well replace all the bearings in the soundhead while I'm at it. Not sure about the projector head yet... I'm just about to start cleaning that up.

[Jesse Crooks]

After cleaning the drive side of the projector head, I did find some a fair amount of wear on the gears. Most of them have a similar wear pattern, with a band in the center of the teeth that is more worn. On the upper continuous sprocket gear, there are also some deeper dings on four of the teeth. Everything turns over easily by hand. My daily drivers have only been Simplexes and Kinotons, so evaluating gear wear is not my strong suit. Does this level of wear warrant a full rebuild, or should I just throw some Super Lube on them and wait until something actually fails?

[John Eickhof]

I have new old stock fibre gears, also there hould be no slop laterally in the lat rollers and the tu pulley will work (if the stud does not fit, i have the correct one, sadly I just threw out 6 SA heads and 5 soundheads in the scrap bin today!! contact me by PM

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Also check the clearance between gear teeth. Normal clearance is about the thuckness of a sheet of notebook paper. Some people take the dowl locating pins out and think they can it better. Check the faces of the steel gears too! If worn badly they will chew up the new fibre gears And use Superlube on the new gears!!!!!!