[filmscanners] Re: Cleaning SS4000 scanner

["Tony Sleep" <tonysleep@halftone.co.uk>]

On 19/07/2009 snsok@cox.net wrote:
> James wrote this last month. At the moment, I have my SS4000 apart
> and I have removed 10 (not 6) self-tappers but see no way to remove
> the carriage. I do have the lamp off, however.

It was me who wrote the report originally. I removed only the lamp carrier
(2 screws) and the front upper portion of the film advance housing (4
screws), then decided any further dismantling looked too hard and probably
unnecessary. Access to the reflex mirror is limited, through a roughly
20mm x 15mm aperture in the bed of the film carrier, but I found it was
enough to be able to thoroughly clean the mirror with a DSLR sensor
cleaning pad on an angled arm (I use Green Clean, the wet pads have a
plastic arm, and I heated and bent one about 45 deg). My mirror had been
utterly filthy with thick dust.

Once I'd done that I could shine a torch onto the mirror and was able to
see the lens cell reflected. That was perfectly clean, so I left it alone.
Just as well, getting to it would require an awful lot more dismantling.

The only other thing I did was to wipe the parts of the coarse and fine
carrier advance worm gears and support rods that I could see, using a pad
with some WD40 to remove old lubricant. I then dribbled a little light
machine oil onto the rods and some light grease onto the worm gears. As
expected, after reassembly, the carrier movement distributed this to the
areas I couldn't get to just by scanning a few frames. The sound of the
mechanism changed noticeably, sounding less strained, during the first
couple of scans.

All the internal dust I could get at was removed at the same time,
especially the little sensor notch toward the rear, LHS of the carrier
mechanism. I have no idea how this sensor works - it doesn't even look
like a sensor just a V-shaped notch in plastic - but that is what detects
the filmstrip holder is not the mounted slide holder. Mine was filled with
fluff that wanted to stay there. You can figure out where it is from the
design of the Polaroid brush (which I don't have).

Just cleaning that mirror has made an amazing difference to scan quality.
It also now very seldom fails to correctly recognise the filmstrip holder
at the first attempt. I think I've had 2 misfeeds in maybe 30 loads. It
had been driving me crazy before, misfeeding about 2/3 the time.

> Any suggestions? Is there a site with some images of this process? I
> spent some time with google but was not successful.

The only page I know of is http://pages.videotron.com/tiller/SS4000faults.htm
which won't tell you much

--
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk

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