We have a real head-scratcher going on here regarding dirtied, green plates and quickly exhausted developer.
Our system is a Scitex platesetter, with the imaged plate going through an oven then into a Kodak MKII plate processor, all in line. Our conductivity at incept of new chemistry is 91 or so and can drop to 88 within a day, even without running plates. Sometimes, it will be very stable. Sometimes, we run a lot of plates and sometimes we don't. We use quite a lot of replenisher, regardless - a cube per 20 hours. Kodak has sent their finest people and tried to replenish per plate, anti-ox up, down and in between, replace the sensor (made no difference - the original sensor was okay), replenish on a schedule . . . We are using those consumables like they're going out of style.
What's worse is that it's totally intermittent. Week before last, we ran maybe 30 plates a day and got satisfactory results. On the weekend, we cleaned the processor by hand, using fresh developer, and replaced the developer and filter. We ran a few test plates - the first was fine, the second a little green, the third okay - same content on each plate. The circulation is working fine.
The baking temp and time is correct and consistent. The plates are all from the same lot and are Kodak Gold Thermal.
So, in sum, we get greened plates, bad for 4/c work, obviously and still "pay the price" of exhausted solution. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Art
Our system is a Scitex platesetter, with the imaged plate going through an oven then into a Kodak MKII plate processor, all in line. Our conductivity at incept of new chemistry is 91 or so and can drop to 88 within a day, even without running plates. Sometimes, it will be very stable. Sometimes, we run a lot of plates and sometimes we don't. We use quite a lot of replenisher, regardless - a cube per 20 hours. Kodak has sent their finest people and tried to replenish per plate, anti-ox up, down and in between, replace the sensor (made no difference - the original sensor was okay), replenish on a schedule . . . We are using those consumables like they're going out of style.
What's worse is that it's totally intermittent. Week before last, we ran maybe 30 plates a day and got satisfactory results. On the weekend, we cleaned the processor by hand, using fresh developer, and replaced the developer and filter. We ran a few test plates - the first was fine, the second a little green, the third okay - same content on each plate. The circulation is working fine.
The baking temp and time is correct and consistent. The plates are all from the same lot and are Kodak Gold Thermal.
So, in sum, we get greened plates, bad for 4/c work, obviously and still "pay the price" of exhausted solution. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Art