I bought a Kodak M70 8mm movie projector from the thrift store yesterday. When I turn it on, the motor seems to run fine, but when I try to put the leader into the slot that says "Film", it won't go into the slot. It seems like there's a sprocket down there, and something makes a clicking noise if the film is inserted a certain way, but it just won't accept the film.

Please help! I've got 20 reels of Super 8 film that are dying to be played...

These projectors, and the cameras made for the instamatic line, are all total junk now. Kodak used a really terrible plastic that disintegrates in a pretty short time. In this case, the teeth on one of the gears of that M70 have all been stripped off. Parts are available here:

http://www.kodakparts.com/KodakM.html

Several members of my family shot super 8 home movies, and they used the instamatic cameras. Within a few short years, all had stripped out their drive gears. The stuff was really just junk from the beginning, rather than the parts now being 30 years old.

If you have some film to play, invest a hundred dollars or so in a nicer sound model with 24/18 fps speed selection. Then you can play everything under the sun. Sound projectors are also typically better built so your irreplaceable film won't be shredded.

Thanks for the advice. Considering that the gear is stripped AND the damping arm broke while I was trying to load film, I'm probably better off getting a new one and junking this one.

I knew the fact that the arm had "snow" on it couldn't be good...

If you have some film to play, invest a hundred dollars or so in a nicer sound model with 24/18 fps speed selection. Then you can play everything under the sun. Sound projectors are also typically better built so your irreplaceable film won't be shredded.

What models do you recommend?

I'm looking for something relatively cheap...I don't have a big budget by any sense of the word.

I don't think I have ever found a decent projector "In the Wild" off the top of my head, anything by Kodak is to be avoided (They have two distinct lines-the Instamatic Series, like your M70, and the later Moviedeck series, which looks nice, but the performance is just dismal).

GAF also made a popular line of projectors, they tend to have bad belts, and shred film acordion style because of the awful auto loading feature.

Bell and Howell also had a popular series of autoloaders: avoid all of them.

I own, or have owned, a Bolex SM8, GAF 3000s, and a Chinon two track stereo model. I think I probably paid 100 dollars for each of them (shipping would be included with that total). Note that I shot down GAF projectors in the above-while their silent models are terrible, their sound projector models are really a nice bargain-I believe they were made for GAF by Eumig or Chinon-such is the 3000s. The best of the best models were made by Bauer and Elmo, and command high prices.