When a Club Member Built a Projector from Scratch

In the narrow lanes of Guwahati, where the Brahmaputra hums in the distance and monsoon light filters through old Assam-type buildings, a quiet kind of craftsmanship has always belonged to the film community. At Gauhati Cine Club, that tradition of hands-on devotion recently took shape in a most unexpected form: a homemade film projector, machined, wired, and aligned by one of its own members, Ranjit Bora, an electrical engineer who had spent two decades repairing cinema equipment across Northeast India. What began as a private tinkering project became the soul of our weekend screenings. Learn more about Gauhaticineclub.org.

For a club that has organized film festivals, screenplay contests, and archive tributes since 1962, the arrival of an in-house projector carried symbolic weight. It signalled that the tools of cinema need not remain locked behind commercial supply chains. A small group of volunteers, donors, and students rallied around the project. The story of its making reveals how patient curiosity and a few borrowed lenses can transform a community's relationship with the moving image.

An Engineer's Cinema Obsession

Ranjit Bora grew up watching Saturday matinees at a single-screen hall in Paltan Bazaar, where reels arrived in dented metal cans and projectionists were treated as minor celebrities. His fascination with the booth never faded, even when he moved to Brisbane in the early 2000s for postgraduate work in power electronics and returned with a suitcase full of schematic diagrams. During his time in Australia, he became a regular at the Queensland Museum's maker markets and spent weekends browsing the showrooms along Queen Street Mall, studying the optical assemblies of modern digital projectors.

Back in Assam, he joined Gauhati Cine Club in 2018 and quickly became the person everyone called when a 16mm film snapped mid-screening. His bookshelf grew heavy with dusty arc lamp manuals and out-of-print British journal issues. He spoke often about a personal dream: to build a working projector that could rival the warmth of the club's aging Cinemeccanica. The dream felt distant until a shipment delay during the 2022 pandemic forced the club to cancel three consecutive film programmes, and Ranjit offered a quiet solution. Give me six months, he said, and a corner of the storeroom.

From Idea to Blueprint

The first weeks were spent drawing, not building. Ranjit sketched gear trains on the backs of festival brochures and tested a borrowed incandescent bulb against the dusty beam of a defective overhead projector. He consulted ageing projectionists from the Chetana cinema in Panbazar, who still remembered adjusting gate tension by feel. Australian cinema classification rules, which Ranjit had studied while volunteering with screen safety courses in Canberra's National Film and Sound Archive district, also shaped his thinking. He designed the machine to handle standard 35mm prints commonly used at cultural screenings, with lens mounts that accepted both vintage and modern objectives.

Materials were gathered patiently. Stepper motors arrived from a surplus shop in Melbourne's inner suburbs, shipped across to a Guwahati supplier. Aluminium housing plates were cut at a small fabrication unit near Ganeshguri. Ranjit built the lamp housing around a high-output halogen source, then wrapped the ventilation ducts in sound-dampening foam to keep the booth quiet. By month four, a full-scale prototype sat on his workbench, wired to a variable autotransformer salvaged from a tea estate's electrical room.

The Workshop Months

The heart of any projector rests in its intermittent mechanism and shutter sync, and Ranjit treated those components with particular reverence. He hand-milled a Geneva drive from cold-rolled steel, polishing the cam lobe with jeweller's rouge until the movement felt butter-smooth. The shutter disc was balanced with tiny counterweights shaped from brass rod. He mounted the entire gate assembly on a vibration-isolating plinth, a trick he had admired in the precision optics workshops near Sydney's Macquarie Park during a brief consulting stint.

Lighting tests occupied most evenings. Ranjit projected test patterns onto the club's whitewashed wall, calibrating the condenser lenses against three different lamp intensities. Volunteers from the screenplay competition crowd helped, marking flicker frequency with a simple stopwatch app and recording results in a shared notebook. The film transport, originally a pair of rubber sprockets, was later upgraded to precision-ground steel parts after a public screening rehearsal tore a 35mm print of a Satyajit Ray classic. That painful Friday led to a redesigned pressure roller and a fresh approach to film path lubrication.

Trials and Public Debut

The first real public trial took place on a humid August evening, with forty members seated on the club's verandah chairs. Footage of an old Assamese documentary rolled through the gate, the lens threw a steady rectangle of warm light onto the borrowed silver screen, and the shutter whispered rather than clattered. There were minor moments of weave as the take-up reel caught the threading, but Ranjit stood beside the machine, ready with a velvet cloth and a steady hand. The applause at the end was as much for the maker as for the film itself.

Word spread through the regional cultural circuit. Filmmakers from across Northeast India, along with visiting diplomats and students from the University of Melbourne's cinema studies programme on exchange in Shillong, began requesting guided tours of the booth. The club decided to host a quarterly "machine night", where the homemade projector sits beside a borrowed Arriscope from a state archive, letting audiences compare the two devices side by side.

A Closer Look at the Machines

The contrast drew curious conversations each evening, especially when younger members realised how accessible the homemade design could be. A local technical college student in Dibrugarh has already begun a similar build using recycled projector parts.

What the Machine Taught Us

Ranjit's projector has done more than illuminate a screen. It has reminded the club that cinema, at its foundation, is a mechanical art tied to light, motion, and human attention. Younger members now spend Saturday afternoons in the workshop corner, learning about gate alignment and lens care, while seniors share stories of Dhaka cinema halls and the travelling exhibitors of the 1970s. The screening calendar, once a quiet affair, has filled with college groups, visiting filmmakers, and curious drop-ins who arrive asking for a tour rather than a ticket.

Visitors who arrive in Guwahati during one of our quarterly machine nights often leave with a fresh image of what a film society can mean. We warmly invite cinephiles, students, and travelling cinema enthusiasts to join us for a screening, browse our archive, or simply spend an evening watching 35mm footage glow through a machine built entirely by hand. Come with curiosity, leave with stories, and be part of the next reel we thread together.