Building an Enlarger.

[seanE]

 

[seanE]

 

[John51]

My first ever print was made with a Halina Paulette camera. I was young, keen and broke. The film was developed see sawing in the cupboard under the stairs. To make the print I epoxied a neg sized piece of plastic to a small cone shaped light shade, had its bulb hanging free at the 'wrong end'. That was the holder and light source. Put a large nail in a beam in the loft, that held the camera using the tripod socket.

Got an image but the closest I could focus it was almost 5 foot. Would make a full frame print of about 3 foot by 4.5 Maybe a bit much for a Paulette? Some how managed to get the exposure ok. Well chuffed with the result, could see detail in the black cats fur.

Once I'd made that print, making another without a proper enlarger had no appeal, so I saved up for a Zenith UPA5. £20 and worth every penny. It helped finance my hobby and I made well over 5000 prints with it. Very sharp lens.

OP.if you were ever thinking of visiting Liverpool, I can get one for you from fleabay and you can pick it up on your way home. Probably won't save you but at least the money has been spent on you rather than international' shipping.

btw, there's a seller in Russia that has new lenses for the UPA5, £11 iirc.

 

[seanE]

after i print a few shots, i probably will buy a Zenith or something like that, for convenience sake.

 

[John51]

My enlarger has a colour head but after my first wet printing (B&W) for decades, the results weren't good. I tried to duplicate a print from almost 30 years ago that I made with the Zenith and I couldn't get any life into it. Even my strip tests for exposure were confusing. Going to be a couple of careful note taking sessions ahead. Will try colour at some point but feel the need to get pleasing results from B&W first.

£16.96 BIN with a p+p of £10.50, is that the Zenith you are looking at? If so, it seems to be all there.

If you are prepared to be patient, I'm sure you'll find something like an LPL with colour head that the seller is ok with packing and posting. After all, if you're going to be spending 70 euros on shipping, might as well have something exciting inside the box.

 

[Sean Mac]

Hi,

Phone Gunns on Wexford St in Dublin.

They have secondhand enlargers and darkroom equipment.

Real nice people to deal with...

I'm on the southside of Dublin, if I can help just ask.

 

[michr]

Making a poor quality enlarger from parts, isn't very difficult. An enlarger is basically a specialized projector. Since you don't intend to spend much money at all, I'll tell you what I did a few years ago with some success.

There a few key components to an enlarger. In the interest of simplicity, don't try to make a vertical enlarger. Instead lay everything out on a table and project against a wall. First you need a light source. For my project I used a screw in CFL bulb in a cheap lamp I picked up from a thrift store. Second, you need a way to diffuse the light so that it lights the film evenly. For this purpose I found some opal glass at the art supply store. I bought one quite a bit bigger than the image I was projecting (which was 4x5). Virtually anything will work as long as it is translucent, doesn't have any texture, and doesn't block the light which photographic paper is sensitive to (blue and green). If I were really desperate I'd buy a dollar store picture frame and coat the glass with Elmer's glue.

Now that you've created the light source and diffuser, you need a box to put it in. A cardboard box is fine if you're using a CFL bulb (because it doesn't emit much heat, still turn it off when not in use). Now for a lens. Enlarging lenses are extremely cheap, but if you can't be pressed to buy one, you can always use the lens of the camera you have. You already know it covers the format well. But aside from this, if you like, you can buy a glass magnifying glass to use instead, but the quality will be lower, and it probably still costs more than an old Wollensak lens from eBay.

Put the lamp in the box, cut a hole in the box centered on the bulb, and tape the diffuser on. Move the lamp around until the diffuser is lit evenly. With card board or foam core, you can create a slot to drop in the negative. For focusing, you can choose to either have fixed focus, which means than you can find the spot where the lens and image cover the paper exactly, and just leave it there. Or you can create a focusing mechanism, the simplest would be a second cardboard box (like a sliding box camera), or the lens taped to a stand somehow. You'll need to move the lens and the projection box relative to the wall to achieve the right focus and image area. Since you aren't using an enlarging bulb, you'll need to need to expose the paper longer. Test the paper for exposure times just like you would with a commercial enlarger.

As you can see, this outfit is very primitive, but with it you can put an image on paper.

 

[gzinsel]

how much is your time worth? DO THE MATH!!!!

 

[John Koehrer]

Like a lot of things, it's not the money, it's the challenge.

Some folks like to grow their own vegetables in stead of paying some farmer to do it.

 

[seanE]

Your time is worthless if you don't use it, Do you watch TV, What do you achieve in your time?, why do people go for walks?, I know this seem a wired idea to some, But time is here to be wasted on creating, Whether its practical or not, If you attempt to create something and fail but learn some thing, or enjoy the process, thats time well spent.
We are human beings, Not machines, If your all about practicality, efficiency, and calculations, I'm sorry but you have already made the cyborg conversion.
Im 16 by the way if that changes things.
After I succeed, Or fail, I will fully comprehend the entire proses, Not havant just read about it in a book.
Plus, When a solar flare hits us il be the only photographer around with my car battery enlarger

 

[Sean Mac]

Im 16 by the way if that changes things.

I'd say that changes things by quite a bit. I'm 48 and an enlarger is less than an hour of work to me.

When I was 16 money was a lot harder to find.

Where are you in Ireland? There's a few places that qualify as the middle of nowhere

Best of luck with your project.

 

[Chan Tran]

Like a lot of things, it's not the money, it's the challenge.

Some folks like to grow their own vegetables in stead of paying some farmer to do it.

I agree with you on this but I would recommend the OP to buy one or several enlargers to use before building one. That way the OP would know exactly what features are wanted.