[villelaustela]

I have repaired two of these EIKI's 16mm projectors. My school had two of them and I took them home and replaced the belts (all snapped and sticky, new ones from eBay). The school did not need both so I got the other one. They are both basically the same version (can't remember the type. The main differences were about the sound, some models play both optical and magnetic soundtracks and the most pro-ones also give you the option to record on the mag. track) but with some differences.

The older one has two on-off switches for motor and lamp (lamp can't be switched on before the motor) and one for reverse (switching from play to reverse the lamp goes dark and the engine slows down and starts to playback in reverse). The newer projector has a big selector knob for driving reverse and normal and threading. Also it has two play settings, low and high luminosity. (The older deck has a switch for that inside the case).

Also I noted that the older one was a lot noisier ("harder noise") as the newer one was more like humming.

I can't remember the date for these but I found a list of projector reservations and these had been in active use in 85-92.

These are really good projectors and they are indeed built like tanks, and they do deliver a very good performance once you learn how to thread the film correctly and have cleaned the film path.