Quote Originally Posted by Greg Blank View Post
There are two ways to look at that I guess, I use less chemistry so tipping the drum may be needed versus using 1,000 ml to remove the anti halation coating.
I don't use more than 600ml in my 3004 and 3005 drums, and I've never had a problem with the anti-halation dye clearing.

Quote Originally Posted by Greg Blank View Post
As for producing more wear...well I know I can get the Motor rotation switch right now and it cost about 55.00 dollars. Even someone with not alot of knowledge could solder it on the circuit board if they knew the switch was the only bad problem.

That switch only regulates the voltage ramp to the motor and turns the motor on/off.
Usually the switch becomes loose or too tight when it fails....and the motor stops of course

If the motor reverses there are at least two components that a heavy drum might damage. The two of the components are on the bottom transformer board and currently cost about 100 for the parts plus three hours for me to disconnect, resolder and test the processor for return to a given customer. I am sure you can do the math at $100.00 per hour.
That's useful to know. And I do worry also about the load induced by the continual reversing - the motor does seem to labor.

The precaution of keeping the developer volume down is easy for me, as I'm not invested in processes that require dilute developers for my sheet film. Beyond that, working with bidirectional rotation, as recommended in the documentation Jobo provided with my processor, has consistently given me clean, evenly-developed negatives. In the absence of hard data on failure rates and failure modes, I'm not ready to spend a big chunk of my limited camera and darkroom time running enough tests with unidirectional drive that I could be equally confident in the results doing it that way.

By the same token, though, if doing it that way works well for somebody else, that's cool too - the "if it ain't broke don't try to fix it" rule applies just as well. There's enough voodoo in the darkroom that I can easily imagine one approach working for one person but another requiring the opposite to get good results. It wouldn't be the first time.