Mini Worrall

A Mini-Worrall, brought back

Everything has a history. This one arrived with most of its still inside.

The Mini-Worrall is a wire-driven head from Cinema Products of Los Angeles. Where most heads of its kind move the camera through gears, the Worrall design runs both axes — pan and tilt — on steel cable. The operator turns two wheels, and the motion travels through wire. It’s what makes the head unusual. This one, serial 106, needed more than a service. It needed most of itself rebuilt.

The work ran over the better part of a year — not because any single repair was slow, but because the most important one had no obvious solution. The pan axis runs on a closed loop with no join, and its outer coating had worn away entirely, leaving nothing to hold the cable together. A jointed cable can be made up from stock; a seamless loop cannot, and no supplier could make a new one. So the original was cleaned and re-coated, evenly all the way around the loop. It should hold for many years.

The rest got the same thoroughness: taken apart, cleaned of rust, worn metal and decades of hardened grease, polished, refastened, and protected against returning corrosion. The brakes had play and would lock themselves as the operator worked — the octagonal nut behind each wheel had gone skewed and walked along with the shaft. Ground flat, re-threaded, grips clean again. The tilt plate’s six locks had all seized; out, polished, and back with new screws.

The rotating base sits over a large thrust bearing — itself worn out and replaced — held by two threaded lock rings, both badly corroded, the upper one seized hard enough to need heat. The original two-ring arrangement is a weak design that either binds the bearing or works loose. So it got a fix it never had from the factory: a screw tapped down through the upper ring to bear against the lower, locking both against the thread without nipping the bearing.

The engraved index plates were refinished — repainted first, then the engraving filled back in.