The cover. I'm not sure when they were introduced, and the book has no date, but I guess around 1964. | ||
My introduction to these was Top of the Pops in Studio G at Lime Grove in 1967. The later version of
the Heron was already in service, with footpedals all round, but for some ancient Tech Ops reason, the two kept
at Lime Grove for the most difficult show of each week were Mk1s. The manual says that they were easy and natural to operate, but forgets to mention that the steering wheel worked backwards when in crab, and the operating levers for the tracker went from stop to full in about a twentieth of their travel. |
||
Also the cameraman
had two panning handles, one with a zoom control, and the other with a progressive hydraulic crane control. Most
of the time on TOTP he needed to work both at once, and the focus with the other hand - and change his shot cards with his.... As a 20 year old tracker, I was the proud designer of a modification to the ground speed controller, which consisted of camera tape wrapped round the quadrant to restrict the movement of the lever at the point where it started working |
||
It was the mark of a man if you could drive a Heron in a figure 8. Long after I left tech ops I tried it again one day, and it was like riding a bike
- my hands and feet still knew what to do, though the rest of me had long forgotten. Here's page 1, in your basic typewriter (a mechanical writing machine of the last century) - unreadable of course, unless you look at the large version. I can pdf the rest, if anyone wants a copy. |
||