Film coating machine (homemade) on Flickr

[holmburgers]

Not finished, but going well. PR is working very hard on it, and I've been in touch with him recently. I'm afraid all will have to wait a bit longer though...

[paul ron]

Very impressive. I hope this inspires small fsctory film manufacturing, like micro breweries, to start popping up all over the place as the big boys take a nose dive.

Thanks for the tour.

[holmburgers]

Seemed like the appropriate place to post this...

This Laboratory Drawdown Coater looks awesome -> http://www.chemsultants.com/testing-...wn-coater.aspx

[Steve Smith]

Awesome indeed... and quite a simple thing to make.


Steve.

[michaelbsc]

Seemed like the appropriate place to post this...

This Laboratory Drawdown Coater looks awesome -> http://www.chemsultants.com/testing-...wn-coater.aspx

Well, the difference between this and the ones I've seen is that all I have ever seen spray the fluid up and coat from the bottom, not the top.

I suspect that a top fed coater would have an issue that as the feed hopper fill height varied then the coating thickness would vary. But maybe not, or at least maybe not within a close enough range.

I do think you could modify this thing to keep it continuously fed with coating material, but you would have to have some way to dry the coating before rolling it up. That's going to take a bit of floor space in a dark area. And with no way to inspect your product before slitting your emulsion defects will be pretty hit or miss.

But what the hell, some film is better than no film, right?

MB

[Photo Engineer]

This is very similar to Jim Browning's coater and also to my coating blade. It uses a doctor blade to surface the coating layer and adjust the thickness. Excess is collected and recycled.

PE

[michaelbsc]

Awesome indeed... and quite a simple thing to make.


Steve.

And probably cheaper than to purchase. The quote from them came in at 6500.00 USD, but you must consider that this is new, with warranty, and expecting to be serviced, and prepared to offer support to an industrial customer instead of a hobby market.

All in all, it probably isn't too outrageous for an industrial customer that wants a coater that "just works out of the box" and doesn't want to fool with it. But it is a bit steep for a guy in a hobby market. I certainly have paid more than that for industrial equipment that "just works" although not quite something as simple as this looks.

But I'll bet something turns up on fleaBay once in a whole lots cheaper.

[Discoman]

Well, the difference between this and the ones I've seen is that all I have ever seen spray the fluid up and coat from the bottom, not the top.

I suspect that a top fed coater would have an issue that as the feed hopper fill height varied then the coating thickness would vary. But maybe not, or at least maybe not within a close enough range.

I do think you could modify this thing to keep it continuously fed with coating material, but you would have to have some way to dry the coating before rolling it up. That's going to take a bit of floor space in a dark area. And with no way to inspect your product before slitting your emulsion defects will be pretty hit or miss.

But what the hell, some film is better than no film, right?

MB

Don't these kinds of machines use rollers to get the coating thickness desired, then used a sized blade to cut the coating from the roller and drop it onto the film/paper/whatever?
I had a PDF of a really old book that had some detailed drawings of glass plate coating machines that worked like that.

[Photo Engineer]

That is probably correct, that a roller and doctor blade (name of the blade) is used, but it may just use a dip and blade or a cascade and blade. There are a multitude of methods out there. They all work in one way or another.

The coating blades that I have sold are like that and we used a variety of similar methods at EK.

PE

[Prof_Pixel]

In browsing around the Kodak website I ran across the following for the Small Scale Slide Hopper Coater: http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQueri...q-locale=en_US

Note that several other coating machines can also be found by following links from that page.