devere 8x10 help

[andrew_frith]

Hi..hoping that someone has experience with a Devere 8x10 Vertical

enlarger..its has the 108 Dichromat head (8 x 250W halogens).

 

I recently was perhaps crazy enough to bring this beast into my

darkroom. I got it from a big print operation that had gone to

lambda's etc so they wanted the devere out of there. It was in good

condition and working fine, and I personally saw it in operation. It

was carefully disassembled and transported back to my house. It has

been re-assembled and an electrician helped me hook up a 30A 250

volt circuit for it.

 

Power seems to be running fine to the enlarger. blower is blowing,

hand controls are moving the motorized stages up and down the

column. But the lightsource is issuing a high pitched tone when the

focus switch is turned on. Power seems to be getting to the head as

the filtration dials are illuminated.

 

>From the manual i have, in the troubleshooting section, it says the

high-pitched tone indicates a lamp is blown. So i used an ohmmeter

to check each bulb and they all seem to be OK. I do have a set of

replacement bulbs, but as the current set are all looking ok on the

meter, does it make sense to swap them out? seems like something

else is going on and triggering the warning alarm?

 

If anyone has experience with this enlarger is there anything that i

should be looking at?

 

thanks

-andrew

[User_503771]

I know I'm probably no help because I haven't used this enlarger. But I have an idea for a strategy:

 

Perhaps you could take one of the replacement bulbs and swap it one by one with other ones, to see if removal of one of them stops the alarm. Then you'll find out if it's a bad bulb. The downside of this strategy is that you might be testing with a bad bulb!

 

The other thing that occurs to me is something from my old electric guitar days: You might want to check the ground to your power supply. If an amplifier isn't grounded properly it makes noise -- very bad for a musician! There was a switch on the back of the amp we could flip to change the ground. Problem solved.

 

I know I had a halogen room lamp that made noise, a sort of buzzing when it hit a certain point on the dimmer switch. As the bulb aged it made more noise. When I replaced the bulb the whole thing started all over again. Perhaps a simplistic example, but maybe there's something about halogen lamps?

 

I hope this helps. Sounds like a great enlarger. Good luck!