Those of you who have one of these beasts or something similar may get a kick out of the final chapter, which took about three days.
The ATL-3 finally got fixed with the help of an intrepid Apugger, Hexavalent, and the invaluable coaching of Omer Hecht from CatLabs.
The problem was diagnosed correctly by Omer - a gunked up pump motor. The problem is that this almost inaccessible. Hex and I wanted to take apart the entire upper assembly but Omer cautioned against this. It is very complicated and fraught with pitfalls that could damage the machine.
Instead Omer suggested removing the front panel and using a very long tube lubricate the bearings. I was very doubtful but we gave it a go and it just wasn't working. Again, I wanted to take the whole thing apart. Omer then suggested that we might try going into the machine where the water spills into the trough, and using a knife to try work the shaft to loosen up the gunk in there and get the oil penetrating. Hexavalent is real machine surgeon and had a huge pair of tweezers which did the job. The motor started turning and pumping water, but very erractically and making quite a bit of noise. It took a while, but he finally got the shaft spinning and it seemed to run great!
In the process of putting the front panel back in, I dropped a screw and it fell right under the lower circuit board somewhere. This board pretty much fills up the space, making the screw almost impossible to find. We tried magnets, compressed air, vacuum, tape - you name it - and we could NOT get that little SOB out.
At this point, Omer suggested draining the machine and tilting or shaking it until the screw came out. Now, you have to realize that this is not a little machine. It is the size of a small car (ok, I exaggerate a little). It weighs, literally, hundreds of pounds. The idea of picking it up and shaking it seemed totally ludicrous. But hey, he was right before. So Hex and I carefully raised it, tilted it and shook it a little - WAY more difficult than it sounds - and the little screw trickled right out.
Not done yet! We put it back together and fired it up only to discover that the pump didn't work, as before. Hex figured that we might have put it out of alignment a little by all our screwing around, attempting to take the upper assembly off and shaking it a little too hard to get the screw out. So we had to loosen up the upper part again, realign the pump shaft, and bolt it down again.
It is now working as it should. I just processed a bunch of 8x10. I can now exhale.
