Sonora Storage

[coremac]

My shop recently switched to a Kodak Achieve and Sonora plates and are looking at storage options for keeping plates organized before they're imaged. We have four sizes: Jet, Hamada, Komori Sprint, and Komori Spica. I was leaning towards a Sandusky Flat File Cabinet with open base, like this:

Sandusky

but Sandusky says the drawers only have a tolerance of 33 lbs., and our Spica plates are 39 lbs. for a package of 50. I've seen the same products from Safco and Edsal, and they say their drawers can take 60 or 80 lbs., respectively. Is Sandusky low-quality, or was the person I chatted with misinformed? There are significant price differences between Sandusky and the other brands, so we would have to be certain that one or the other would be worth the cost.

And, is the flat file cabinet even a suitable way to store the plates? One of my managers wants to get something like this:

Welded Storage Cabinets in Stock - ULINE

But I was planning on keeping the desktop and monitor for the Achieve on top of the flat file cabinet, which I couldn't do a with welded cabinet.

If anyone can post photos of how their plates are organized, it would be helpful to know what works. Thank you.

 

[DCurry]

Whatever you end up with, make sure it is fairly light-tight. The Sonoras are very sensitive to light and lose their ability to hold an image if exposed to light for too long.

We have a Kodak Achieve CTP with autoload, and the plate bay is not light-tight, so after a weekend the topmost plate is no good. Kodak gave us a band-aid solution of light-blocking fabric draped over the unit, but it doesn't do the trick either. They told us they were reverse-engineering a solution and that we would have it installed by last February, but that hasn't happened, either.

So, on Fridays we open up the bay and put an old plate on top to block the light from the good plates. It helps.

 

[coremac]

Whatever you end up with, make sure it is fairly light-tight. The Sonoras are very sensitive to light and lose their ability to hold an image if exposed to light for too long.

I was planning on storing the plates with the light-proof paper wrap they are packaged in (Bit of a pain since its glued to the box). Also, the plate room was originally set up for violet Agfa chemical plates, so with lights out and door closed its light proof as well. Good to know about the auto-loader though, since some walls might have to get rearranged to fit one from what I've seen.

 

[DCurry]

The autoloader on mine doesn't require any larger footprint - it simply juts out vertically from where you would manually load a Trendsetter. Yours may be different, though - mine only holds 1 plate size at a time.

 

[coremac]

The autoloader on mine doesn't require any larger footprint - it simply juts out vertically from where you would manually load a Trendsetter. Yours may be different, though - mine only holds 1 plate size at a time.

Yeah, I saw a video of the autoloader and how the cartridges move around, and the whole set up looks like it would take twice the space that we have right now. We have to manually load each plate, which is why we're looking for an offline storage option to keep plates safe and organized.

 

[dabob]

We keep ours (violet) in a flat drawer but we have used the black plastic to create a light dam over the plates . . . works ok for the last 5-6 years . .