[LargeFormat] Jobo Processors, the cleaning blurb

[largeformat@f32.net]

Hi Dick,

Cleaning the ATL:

Materials:
'Jobo processor clean' or similar product. I believe that it is based on dillute sulpheric acid, at least that was what the bottle said. Furthermore a hand scrubber and some small cork plugs plus lots of water and quiet some hours of my spare time.

How I went along, day 1:
Dragged the ATL outside, connected it to the watersupply and filled the waterbath. Poured 1 liter of processor clean into the waterbath and set the temperature of a programm to 40 degrees celcius and let the ATL heat up the waterbath while the pump circulated the water. After 3 hours I started to scrub everything and drained to waterbath and rinsed the machine with fresh water until all residue was removed. Before I started all inside walls where covered with Algea, but the walls and everything else I could reach with the scrubber is clean again. I removed the 18 bottles and put them in a seperate tub with processor clean and let them soak overnight.

Special attention: check the two floater switches that control the waterlevel, they where stuck a little on my ATL. In the ATL 2000 you can find them at the left side under the head, two white floaters (well darkgreen, after cleaning they are white)

Day 2:
Gave all bottles a decent scrub (in and outside) and rinsed them, the outside was covererd with algea, the inside with some sludge of E6 chemicals. Bottles came out nice, but where still a little discolored. I tossed the worst 6 and bought 6 new ones (standard JOBO bottles) to be installed in the front row. 12 Bottles are standard JOBO bottles, 6 other are those you fill with chemicals prior to processing a film, these are ATL specific bottles, I got them clean, otherwise order new ones.

I raised the lift and filled the hoses that transport the chemicals from the bottle to the drum with a 'strong' mixture of processor clean, I kept the tubes level with the nozzle that attaches to the drum and kept pouring until it exited the nozzle. To keep the fluid in the tubes I put some small cork plugs in the tubes and tied them with a long rope from the ceiling to keep them level. I didn't clean the tubes that pressurize the bottles, they where clean. Unfortunally I could not remove the hoses from the lifthead as they where fixed to the head with big lumps of silicon kit. I first planned to replace the hoses by new ones, but as the processor clean did a good job and replacing them would have been major surgery I didn't replace the hoses.

Day 3:
Drained the hoses and rinsed them thouroughly, one of the 6 hoses had still some sludge in it but with the use of a small brush/scrubber I could remove it. Brush was similar to those you clean the barrel of a gun with. On day 1 I removed some bodyparts to better reach the inside, after rinsing the ATL for the last time I re-assembled it, installed all bottles and connected all hoses.

After cleaning the machine I had no problems with contamination from old chemicals, from the first roll on I had no problems.

Today, a year later, the waterbath is still clean, I occasionally drain some of it and refill with fresh water. 

After using the machine I always run the cleaning program twice to remove leftover chemicals from the bottles. 

The processor clean I used was a liquid concentrate, JOBO's stuff is powder.

I hope this helps, if you still have questions, let me know.

Huib

http://home.plex.nl/~hsmeets