Alan, that makes more sense. I was wondering how you hadn't already thought of this.
I would use the pins (buy used for sure), the swing arm platen and then simply purchase two of the exact type of spring nose plungers used on the swing arms. Mount those precisely to whatever type of hinge apparatus you work out and I bet this would work very well.
eb, that's really enlightening, I too wondered what special Austrian magic was going on in the MHM FPU.
I still really don't mind carriers as I like to stack up films before sending to screen room to check things out. If I'm going to sit there and line them all up perfectly anyways, it's just one quick additional step to tape em to a hanger sheet. You get to see a lot of things you might not notice otherwise, like a stretched out color that doesn't align to the others which does happen once in awhile when outputting from an epson. I still feel like a punch system where you use a flap of blank film at the top would be cooler but Newman folks say they tried it and no go there.