Boland Black Beauty, Screen Stars, Brooklands, White City...

[brigham]

Little Duke or Duchess.
The overhung mech was easy to convert to single reel.

[coppinpr]

I don't know if you're talking about a different "little Duke" than the one I know. On the well known Jennings Little Duke the reels spin the wrong way to work in this machine.

[brigham]

So that Boland single-reeler spins from bottom to top?

[JC]

I don't know if you're talking about a different "Little Duke".......

Have to admit, when I saw Brigham's post I wondered how a Little Duke would work as a Boland single-reeler (or indeed a three-reeler)

[brigham]

The Duke/Duchess mechanism is concentrated at the right-hand end of the reel/disc spindle, leaving the reels/discs virtually outside the frames. This allows the enthusiastic re-vamper plenty of room to incorporate such gear as 30-stop bicycle sprockets, &c..
All the Duke/Duchess models I've seen, including my own, turn in the same direction as the familiar Mills machines, eg. clockwise when viewed from the 'non-handle' end. I've yet to see a single-reel conversion that runs the 'other' way, although there's no reason why such a thing couldn't be built.
It has long been my intent to build a single-reeler, based on the idea, but not the style, of Boland or Hooper. I need a theme. What are there thirty of, apart from film stars and racehorses?

[coppinpr]

This is a standard Boland single reel mech.