Kodak plant in Weatherford, OK

Photo Engineer · Sep 1, 2008

The Sun Chemical agreement apparently had some obligations attached. You see that if you look up the original. Also included in this was purchase of Memorex and also, some of this stretched over nearly 5 years as the acqusition progressed. It was not done in one step.

PE

AgX · Sep 1, 2008

PE,
Your hint at the waterconsumption is very intersting.
I like to add that the quotation I gave in post 16 was found at the imation site (the link is dead meanwhile).

But I want to add to your doubts that from experience I can say that one can't be sure what's going on in the photochemical industry behind closed doors until oneself has gone through them...

Kino · Sep 1, 2008

This is a pointless exercise; PE, Weatherford sits on the Olagalla aquifer, a huge ice-age aquifer under the Oklahoma, Kansas plains, quoted in this APUG thread on distilled water:

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

It is near pure straight out of the ground and WAS plentiful until manufacturing and irrigation has depleted it severely.

Ferannia DID once coat film, color film, in this facility for at least 10 years, maybe 20 -- what is happening there now is anyone's guess.

Photo Engineer · Sep 1, 2008

It is pointless. I think that was pointed out by several people.

Ferrania did once coat film there and found it to be untenable despite the water supply. That should be a significant factor in this, as well as the fact that Kodak and Ferrania have been and are direct competitors in the analog field.

PE

dr5chrome · Sep 1, 2008

.hmmmm.. if that is the case Kodak must be trucking the water in from the great lakes... eastern Colorados average humidity is 5-20% and gets at the most 10in. of rain a year w/310 days of sunshine a year.
The water in this part of the state is reclaimed water. this means everytime you flush the toilet, that water had been used at least 7 times before.
Denver CO has one of the most advanced sewage treatment plants in the country. Oklahoma has 3 times the rain and double the humidity of east Colorado [just east of the Rockies].
In addition 'we' [our lab] need to have humidifiers running continually. it is very-very dry in this part of the country... very dry!

dw

Photo Engineer said:
Well, I have a question that must be answered first. How dry is Weatherford?

You see, coating takes a lot of water and is not feasible in a dry environment, and so Kodak is near lakes or at least a LOT of water for each of its plants. So, if Weatherford is too dry, I doubt if much color was made there due to lack of water. OTOH, the premelts may have been brought in and coated there or the precoated film may have been slit, chopped and packed there.

PE

Kino · Sep 1, 2008

Well, for whatever reason, it remains that Ferannia made Scotch brand films (among others) out there for at least 10 years, maybe 20 or more and left when the film market started to decline and sold their assets to Imation, who sold to Kodak or whatever.

PE, seems like you insist it was a failed venture when it was far from it...

Ray Rogers · Sep 1, 2008

Photo Engineer said:
To coat it, you need a huge chilling and heating system for chill set and dry, and a big humidity control system. This uses loads of water.

You also need a water driven decontamination system to remove chemicals from the effluent of the coating and making operation and from the dryer exhaust. PE

Thanks for that review of water use, Ron.

I would like to imagine that the large majority of the water that is required is either confined to a closed system or recovered and reused.

If I recall early Agfa used to recycle their solvent as it evaporated during drying... a very nasty environment for the workers that minded the tunnel.

If I understand what you have written here and most of that water was lost... the whole factory could be thought of as one big "humidifier",
and there was little recycling to speak of.

Photo Engineer · Sep 1, 2008

Kino said:
PE, seems like you insist it was a failed venture when it was far from it...

Sorry, I don't think it was a failed venture at the start, but it ultimately did appear to fail and was sold. The capacity of the equipment to make color film is vastly higher than that needed for the graphics arts industry, especially for the 2 products now offered by Imation.

Therefore, I am saying that it seems to be overcapacity for the graphics market and coating is probably no longer done there. The products are probably shipped from Colorado or Rochester. See my previous posts for information on the Imation website.

They probably use this site to package inks and cartridges and also make graphics arts devices. They also make digital storage systems.

It would seem likely to me that the coating line is either gone or shut down. Running at under capacity would be very unprofitable.

Ray;

Recyling water loaded with hardener and other organics is difficult. So, they have to have a reclamation scrubber on all air systems and an RO or UF on all water systems to catch unwanted effluent.

Much of the water is used for CTB jackets though and during idle time you do not want water in the CTB jackets or lines due to corrosion problems.

If you look at the 4 stacks coming from Kodak Park and West Kodak, all of them are seen to be releasing a lot of steam from these operations as well as the KP electric generation system which supplies EK with 440, 220 and 120 VAC and is supplied by a railroad delivering coal for power.

So, huge power is another requirement BTW, to heat and cool air and water. The entire KP plant is at 75F 50% RH and the cold stores are at about 4 deg C or 40 F. Another expense to explain why the plant must operate continually.

As film or paper is made, it must be stored in a cold, dry spot or it will spoil. Therefore temperature and humidity control throughout the entire operation is paramount.

But, the bottom line is that if you make 1000 L of emulsion and coat it, the water content is driven off into the coating machine and ultimately through a scrubber, into the air. Humidity is one "effluent" that comes out of all coating operations.

PE

Ray Rogers · Sep 4, 2008

Menage à trois?

When looking at one of the sites that was mentioned in this thread, one site asked me if I had a comment or would like to submit a question... I did so I did and this my short question and their reply.:
-----------------------------
Comments:
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

See above link fo full details.
------------------------------------
Greetings!

Several people are curious about the relationship between the Eastman Kodak
Company, Ferannia and Imation...
as they are listed as having the same address:

2720 East Frontage Road
Weatherford, OK 73096

Any information you could share would help to inform many inquisitive minds
and
be a plus for public relations in general.

Thank you,

Ray Rogers
-----------------------

Imation was spun-off from 3M Company in 1996. Imation sold off some of its
businesses a few years later to companies such as Ferrania and Eastman
Kodak. Imation continues to manufacture its magnetic data storage tape at
its manufacturing facility in Weatherford, OK, and it is possible that
Ferrania and Eastman Kodak also manufacture products there.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Hummm,
Its starting to sound perfectly normal when you put it that way.

Anyway that is the word from Imation.

Photo Engineer · Sep 4, 2008

You see how confusing it is? And this makes our confusion sound perfectly normal.

Seems like even Imation don't know.

PE

Ray Rogers · Sep 4, 2008

Photo Engineer said:
You see how confusing it is? And this makes our confusion sound perfectly normal.

Seems like even Imation don't know.

PE

The one idea that presents its self to me is that, since coating equipment is so huge, both physically and financially, and as we have learned, is way under used these days, I wonder what the possibility is that they might have struck an agreement to share a coater?

Photo Engineer · Sep 4, 2008

Ray;

The Kodak coating technology is so far ahead of most everyone else that I doubt if they would share any information on this. And the less sophisticated Ferrania based equipment might not be able to handle Kodak formulas anyhow. IDK for sure, but this was my first thought.

Besides, the coating equipment, as I have said before, is probably more valuable as scrap than the 2 or 3 products coated on it from all outward evidence.

Assume you have a machine worth $1M as scrap taking up hundreds of cubes of space. It is making a tidy profit of $10,000/year. That means that you could make 100 years worth of profits just by selling the machine as scrap. That is an extreme example, but add in labor, taxes and utiliities, and the nascent move to digital and you see what I'm getting at.

PE

Ray Rogers · Sep 4, 2008

Photo Engineer said:
Ray;

The Kodak coating technology is so far ahead of most everyone else that I doubt if they would share any information on this.
PE

Yes that would have been true years ago, but if Kodak (and the world!) is going digital,
they might not be so protective of dying (?) technology

I am assuming of course that that particular equipment and technology is not all that essential to digital material. This is just a wild guess.
...

Photo Engineer said:
Assume you have a machine worth $1M as scrap taking up hundreds of cubes of space. It is making a tidy profit of $10,000/year. That means that you could make 100 years worth of profits just by selling the machine as scrap.
PE

Yes, but wasn't the figure Imation claims Kodak owes them 25 Million?

Anyway,
I don't really have any agendas or points to make, I am just thinking outloud.
You probably have the best grasp as to whats going on as anyone not actually working on site.

Ray

David Foy · Jun 1, 2009

Kodak, 3M, Ferrania

At one point, 3M's "Imation" division had a contract to make microfilm for Kodak.

mts · Jun 1, 2009

I'll toss out for everyone here that in the early 90s I gave a presentation to Kodak management concerning some patents I hold relating to digital. They listened politely and then explained that Kodak was a film company interested in digital only as a sensor manufacturer. We all know what happened after....

No affordable electronic sensors I know of yet produce anything like the ~70+ MB stored in a single 35mm color frame. I am also willing to bet that in 50 years my film holds up better than my DVD-R or hard disk media. Who knows if Windows 2060 will even support such things? Anybody here have pictures stored on 5-1/2" single-density floppies? Even with degradation film is likely as archival or more so than bits floating in the eather. When I hit the last picture on a roll, I remind myself that I have to change my "memory film."

BradS · Jun 1, 2009

I worked in the Weatherford plant back in the early-mid 1980's. It was a 3M plant then. There were two plants on that site. The one I worked in cut and packed Color-Key. Color-Key is / was used in color printing - as in newspapers and magazines. It had nothing to do with film. They may or may not have coated the product there...I simply do not remember. Nor do I remember what they did in the other plant - may have been film - IDK. I also worked in the Camarillo, CA plant. There was definitely a coater in Camarillo...but they coated magnetic media - tape and data cart's.

BenOK · Aug 11, 2009

Kodak and imation are still both coating film!

Hello all,

I am a current employee at the imation facility in Weatherford, OK. I am a maintenance technician in the thin film coating area where we produce film for LTO 1-5 cartridges for multiple customers as well as T10,000 cartridges for Sun Microsystems. As far as Kodak is concerned they are still producing specialty films in their coating facility.

The physical location of Kodak is a large building closest to I-40 when viewed by google earth. It used to share the building with Ferrania before they closed up shop here and consolidated back to Italy. Currently Kodak only takes up the west half of the front building. Imation takes the back building of the premises. Both large buildings and the numerous out-buildings all comprised the 3M site until 1996 when the entire site was spun off to imation. Once imation had it all it was then broken up and sold off to kodak for coating in the front (North) building with Ferrania doing pre-packaged one use cameras in a portion of that front building. Imation remained in the back (South) building.

Hope this information helps all who were interesting in finding out what is going on in Weatherford.

-Ben

AgX · Aug 11, 2009

Hello Ben,

Thanks for your detailed information.
Though the kind of film coating we here typically get upset by is silver-halide film coating. Is that what you're referring to with Kodak?

Photo Engineer · Aug 11, 2009

LTO 1-5 is apparently a magnetic tape.

PE

BradS · Aug 11, 2009

Photo Engineer said:
LTO 1-5 is apparently a magnetic tape.

PE

Yes. They coat magnetic media.

AgX · Aug 12, 2009

PE, Brad,

You are enigmatic. You mean Kodak is coating there magnetic film as Imation does?

Photo Engineer · Aug 12, 2009

No, I didn't say that. I said that LTO 1-5 is a magnetic tape. If Kodak is using any of the cartridges made there for LTO 1-5 then it is magnetic tape. They used to make magnetic tape at the solvent coating facility in Kodak Park, but I thought that they stopped making it. IDK what the OK plants makes.

PE

aldevo · Aug 12, 2009

Photo Engineer said:
How wonderful. I'm glad to hear it. Must be a new regional center as well, but please note that this is primarily a digital conversion and storage company (Imation).

PE

FujiFilm is also a big player in the magnetic tape market. The largest application I know of for this is media backup for computer systems (e.g. database servers).

Photo Engineer · Aug 12, 2009

Kodak has switched to making high capacity DVDs with great permanance. Their recordings are apparently very stable and less subject to degradation. They are gaining a reputation here (or were) as suppliers of high quality backup media and RW "hard" drives. IDK if they are still in the business.

PE

BenOK · Sep 19, 2009

Kodak in Weatherford

Hello all,

The Kodak site in Weatherford was not in the business of producing film for cameras. That site produces specialty films for the medical imaging industry and other specialty films that I don't have further details on.

Forgive me for not explaining further about Imation. We produce data cartridges used for data storage purposes.

Take care everyone.

-BenOK

Kodak plant in Weatherford, OK

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency