I will give you information on how I used to set up the inking and dampening systems on a SM52. It sounds like you make have an ink feed problem if you say that all your dampening has been set.
1. Use yellow ink or warm red to see the stripes. Proceed to ink up all the rollers including the dampening system.The inking rollers should have a a 4mm stripe form roller to distributor. A critical setting is the ink ductor to the fountain roller. It must be 4mm. If you have 4mm to the ink fountain roller, then the ductor to the ink distributor will be set automatically. If this setting is wrong then the dampening system washes out the color.
2. The intermediate roller setting is 3mm to the dampening form roller. The setting to the White ink form is factory set unless someone has tampered with those settings. Set the dampening form to distributor 4-5mm.
3. Engage or drop the ink form rollers to the plate and put the press on crawl and let it go around several revolutions and stop the revolution when the plate cylinder gap has just passed the front guard.
4. Engage the dampener 4 about 10 seconds holding the button on. Release the button and take of the ink form rollers from the plate.
5. Check the Chrome metering roller to the dampening form by turning it by hand and check for a 4-5mm stripe.
6. Now go the plate gap and inch the press forward. You should be able to see 5 stripes. Ist stripe is the yellow roller, second will be red, third will be blue and the 4th will be white. The 5th stripe will be your dampener..
if all of these settings are correct then you should be OK. Then test if it works, put on a plate with an image, run the press ink up the plate solid and then put on the dampener. If your settings are good and you chemistry is OK the plate should clean up it about 4-5 revolutions.
I discussed the night latch in a previous post. That is critical as is the ink ductor setting.
The intermediate roller was designed to be used for heavy ink coverage. You can run with it engaged, or off. When you stop the press it re-engages. It must be engaged when you wash up, that is why it re-connects.
