Need 35mm core measurements

I have 400 feet of Eastman 5222 in the freezer. I received five re-loadable cassettes a few days ago so only now am I thinking of how I'm going to load these in my not-light-tight-enough darkroom. Can someone tell me the diameter of the hole in the core of film spools like this? With no flanges I'm afraid a wobble will cause the film to telescope into a disaster. I'll do something in a box with a changing bag type of sleeve arrangement.

thanks,

s-a

With 400' rolls I always used lid of the film can as "tray" and from there I loaded on the spools. Yes, you will have 2 or 3 circles of film between big roll and your spool but there is nothing to worry about. Just be sure that you cleaned all the dust and junk around your working space. If you keep 400' roll vertically with out same kind of flanges, you will be in trouble. As for light tightness, just do it during the night. Plastic core has hole just over 1" or precisely 26mm wide. Good luck!

gorbas said:

With 400' rolls I always used lid of the film can as "tray" and from there I loaded on the spools. Yes, you will have 2 or 3 circles of film between big roll and your spool but there is nothing to worry about. Just be sure that you cleaned all the dust and junk around your working space. If you keep 400' roll vertically with out same kind of flanges, you will be in trouble. As for light tightness, just do it during the night. Plastic core has hole just over 1" or precisely 26mm wide. Good luck!

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Gorbas,

It never occurred to me to just unspool it from a horizontal position. Thanks for concurring on the danger of vertical use!

Henny Youngman: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
Henny Youngman: ...

s-a

I also just leave it flat on the lid, and kept in the bag. I pull slowly to take out film if doing individual rolls. If I need to reroll onto a 100ft bulk loader spool, I also keep both ends flat on the table without the support lids and roll with both hands. With the individual rolls I dont use gloves as I have to deal with taping them onto the cassettes, when I reroll into smaller rolls I use lint free tight fitting white fabric gloves. I have done this with 400ft rolls and 1000ft rolls.

I picked up a set of nice neumade rewinds thinking that I could make it work much faster, but the set I got was for 16mm only and didnt fit the 35mm (the locking lever couldnt engage because of the thickness). But if you have a darkroom, that would be the ideal way, and you can reroll a 400ft spool into 100ft lengths very quickly.

Back in the day at my film school, at my TV station and in every lab I visited they had those rewinding tables for 16 or 35mm located in real darkrooms, so life was easy for splitting long rolls to shorter ones, but then we didn't have 100' still photography cassette loaders. Well, you can't have everything!