Wigobolt vs. Jobo

[Daniel Fort]

After yet another hiatus from developing film I'm back at it. Living in a condo and not having a darkroom or rather a dark enough room, means tank development for all formats including sheet film. One of my favorite pieces of film processing equipment is the 20th Century Camera "reel" for processing sheet film in a Paterson tank. With the apparent demise of 20th Century Camera due to a fire one year ago the stock of these reels seems to have dried up.

However, I recently found what appears to be the same reel for 4x5 film available for Jobo tanks sold through Amazon, CatLabs, eTone, ebay and others as a Chinese "Wigobolt" product. The bad news is that it doesn't fit into a Paterson tank, only a Jobo tank. The good news is that it also fits into a Wigobolt tank which looks exactly like a Jobo tank and is much less expensive.

There doesn't seem to be many reviews. Does anyone have any experience with these Wigobolt products?

 

[wiedzmin]

I use 4x5 reel for 1500 tanks. So far no complains. Easy to load.
I use it with 1540 tank or 1530+1510 tanks. I prewet.

 

[grahamp]

Since the 4x5 version does not (apparently) have the equivalent of the wings added to the Jobo 2509n reel, do you see any surge marks on the film edges doing rotary processing?

 

[wiedzmin]

So far no surge marks.

I'm using it with jobo cpe-2, speed 2 with prewet, jobo tanks.

I did not use it for color films yet only b-w as of now.