Accidental find - the perfect analog 3 minute print timer!

[David Brown]

Picked this up for $9.95 (+ shipping, of course). The 60 second versions of these old Time-o-lites exist in the zillions. At any given time, there are probably 15-20 on the auction site. I still have 2 that I don't use anymore, and gave a 3rd one away a few years ago.

Anyway, just came across this one and snapped it up. Needs cleaning, but works perfectly and is surprisingly accurate. It will replace the old Spiratone "Darkroom Director" for timing prints in the developer. The electronic Spiratone will eventually die and the mechanical Time-o-Lite probably never will!

Also, in looking through all the ones for sale, I came across (but did not buy) a 60 MINUTE version. Didn't know that Industrial Timer Corporation made that one either, but it shouldn't be surprising. GraLab also made all kinds of timers for applications other than the darkroom.

 

[Loren Sattler]

Dave, curious what you use for your enlarger? I find my Darkroom Director an ideal enlarger timer and an old Gra lab timer very quick and useful for development times.

 

[David Brown]

Dave, curious what you use for your enlarger? I find my Darkroom Director an ideal enlarger timer and an old Gra lab timer very quick and useful for development times.

I use the RH Designs StopClock Pro for enlarging. I use a GraLab for film development.

On the printing side, I develop MGIV for a full 3 minutes. I was using the darkroom director as a process timer of sorts. I would program the develop, stop and fix time in channels 1,2,3, and then again in 4,5,6 and 7,8,9. Cycling through using the foot switch was easy. However, I had to punch in the times each darkroom session since it is prone to "forgetting" the set time in random channels. I've had 2 of them. this timer will just simplify things, as it will simply stay at 3 minutes - or whatever I move the hand to (60 seconds for RC). I really don't need a timer for stop and I can look at the clock for fixer.

I'll keep the Spiratone, since I can see where it would be useful if I was ever doing a complicated multi-step (more than 2) dodging and burning print and wanted to make multiple copies.

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

Both GraLab and Industrial Timer Corp. (Time-O-Lite) are, er, industrial timer companies.

Photographic applications are only a small part of their business.

Which is why they really aren't suited to photography at all, they just happened to be what was available. And until recently digital photographic timers simply aped the function of a general purpose industrial timer.