Agfa Avanta help needed

[rjneeley36]

I am fairly new at maintaining an imagesetter, and have had to do a lot of fumbling around, making calls, etc., to keep my imagesetter running as it should run. However, I've run into a couple of issues that I'm clueless about and wonder if anyone can help me? Here are my concerns: BTW, I have an Agfa Avantra 36/44 OLP.

I work full time, 5 days a week. However, I telecommute on Tuesdays and Thursdays so we leave the imagesetter running 24 hours a day. I am the only mac operator in my office. Is this a problem? I ask because we've started running into issues of the film coming out "dirty" the first 10 or so negs we run. Is the imagesetter on too long? Is the chemistry weakening? Do I have a bad batch of film or chemistry? This problem has only recently come up (last 2 weeks), but I've been telecommuting twice a week for 3 years and never noticed this problem before.

Also, we have squeaks all thru the processor. A tech gave me a tube of Molykote to put on the gears, but I'm running out. He had to jump thru all sorts of hoops to even find a tube so I'm wondering what luck I'll have finding that myself. What do you put on your gears?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give me!!!

Rachel

[jimking]

Never fooled with the gears but we've always left the imagesetter on and its been on for 8 years! It is your film processor that is dirty and should be cleaned. I'm sure you've got muck in the water tank and rollers. Dump the tank and clean her up and ad a touch of bleach to the water tank. Keep some old film handy to run through the processor in the morning to clean the rollers off. If you smell a very strong ammonia smell then you have a bad mix of chemistry. If the film comes out light or you can see through the black part of the film, you have weak chemistry, you'll need to pump it up. If that doesn't work then the fan and pumps are going bad.