MFHult@nothydrologistnot.com wrote in message

Ah, there's the rub. The power cable on this thing has 9 pins. It's a
rather involved affair. I think I can describe the situation
adequately without resorting to uploading an image.

Picture the female power plug on the back of the machine as
three rows of sockets. Based on a previous description
(http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=XPZw9.228060%24
%25d2.76550%40sccrnsc01)
my plug is _sideways_ with respect to the half-moon and round
pin sockets (that post discussed the possibility of the
arrangement being upside down; mine is sideways). Having made that
adjustment, we have this arrangement of sockets, where 2, 7, and 9 are
the "half-moon" sockets:

               1  2  3
               4  5  6
               7  8  9

As I look on the machine's female plug, I see that female sockets
3,4,6
have no contacts in them. Looking on the back of the male connector
that plugs into the back, I see that:

a) there are two white jumper cables, one that connects pin 5 and 2
together and another that connects pins 4 and 5 togeher. Since 4 has
no contact, this second jumper would appear to be meaningless.

b) Socket 7 is connected to yellow/green, 1 to blue, and 9 to brown.
At the other end of the cable, on the UK power plug, yellow maps to
ground, and blue maps to the left prong (as you face thew all), and
brown to the right. This plug has a built-in 3A fuse between the blue
wire and the right power prong.

According to the afforementioneed post, the pins have these meanings
for the 120 V setup: "The AC hot is pins number 2 & 3, AC neutral is
pin number 9 and ground is number 7." For my unit this interpretation
does not hold becuase number three
is an empty contact. Again, in terms of that posting, my plug is
sideways but
I have numbered in accordance with the position of the half-moon
socket.
So I'm quite perplexed.

But we have not gotten to the power switches yet. In the back of the
unit,
where the power switches should be, I have this straight bank of 9
screw-posts, numbbered 1 through 9. There are two
jumpers cocnfigured as follows:

          1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
          |     |           |     |
          |_____|           |_____|

In other words, 1 is jumpered to 3 and 7 is jumpered to 9.

So much for the electrical aspect.

As for the step tablet: I have a 21 step tablet from stouffers, but
it's not
calibrated. Is it necessary for it to be calibrated? The specs for it
say
that it begins (if memory serves) at 0.15 and increases in density
increments of
. . . I can't remember but I have it written down somewhere. Can't I
just
rely on what they say are its specifications rather than having it
officially calibrated?

Thanks for your help!!!

--Phil

Status M is for color negatives (assuming that's what the M suffix on your
model number refers to). For black and white, you don't need or use the three
colored Status M filters so there is no point in calibrating them. The filter
colors don't stay true indefinitely and with these ~30-year-old instruments,
the filters would require/warrant replacement if you did want to do
quantitative color work .  

Many/some Status-M models don't have a "visual" channel for panchromatic film
but instead have a filter for ortho (i.e, reproduction with reduced
sensitivity to red light) film. For most purposes with panchromatic black and
white film -- unless you are using negatives that are heavily stained like
pyro -- any of the channels will work more or less OK. For pyro, preferably
use a blue filter.

You can easily determine whether your instrument requires a significant warm
up period to stabilize, or *much* worse, that it drifts,  simply by watching
its behavior. I've been pleasantly surprised by the stability of the
densitometers that I've used.  

... Marc
Marc_F_Hult

Nick Zentena <zentena@hophead.dyndns.org> wrote in message

Wow, thanks for looking that up! No, mine definitely does not have the
addendum.

But this is still confusing. I don't have anything that I would
describe as top-to-bottom. On the female blug into the rear of the
machine, I have the three rows of three for a total of 9 socket pins.
Inside the machine, I have a row of screws from 1 through 9, numbered
from left-to-right. Moreover, that row does not have colored wires
connected to it. Just two jumpers as I've described.

Are you describing a row of screws inside the machine or the plug on
the back?

--Phil