Restarting 120 film production at ADOX reqiured two things: repairing the slitter and the film spooling machine. The first step has been successfully accomplished: the slitter is running like new! The rest of the 120 film finishing is more complex than 35mm: alighning to the backing paper, film cutting, attaching to the backing paper, spooling, cutting backing paper, putting a label around the roll. All of those tasks can be accomplished inside one single machine filled with wires and sensors. After not working for many years, like all electronic devices do, this machine, Hitachi, has also decided to partially die. We would repair one component, and another would break, spitting out various error messages.
The technical team decided to strip Hitachi down completely and put it back together from zero. This is an extraordinaly complex task, and our team has been busy with it since the beginning of the year. Even though we cannot predict when this beauty runs again, we will surely celebrate and release tons of 120 film when it does (we even have box designs ready!).