This post is my reflections on, and semi-review of, the Intrepid 4x5 enlarger. I have no relation to Intrepid the company, other than that I recently gave them a lot of money. I've seen a lot of posts from people curious about it, but not so many from people who have actually used them... I've only used it a few times, but at least I can share my experiences so far. It should also be noted that I am a complete amateur hobbiest, and I just play with this stuff for fun. I don't make museum-quality prints regardless of the equipment, and I can't really judge the quality of a print.
This is about the conversion kit for Intrepid's 4x5 camera, which has carriers for 35mm, medium format, and 4x5. They also sell a little standalone enlarger that only does 35mm and medium format, which I haven't used. They share a control unit, so at least some of this commentary will apply to that one as well.
The kit is a simple two-piece device: an LED light source that replaces the ground glass on the back of the camera (locking into place with graflok clips), and a little digital controller box where you set times and contrast (or color), and turn the light on and off. The controller box also has a safelight built in. The negative carriers slide into a slot in the light source's frame.
The first question is why would you even consider buying this thing? There are, after all, "real" enlargers flooding the local classifieds. I can think of 5 reasons why you might:
1) You think a brand new product will be better made and/or easier to use than some old used clunker of an enlarger from 40 years ago.
2) You think "real" enlargers look confusing and complicated, and don't know how to tell if a used one will work.
3) You are buying a 4x5 camera anyway, don't already have a darkroom, and figure you might as well get an enlarger out of it.
4) You live in a place that doesn't have local classifieds full of cheap darkroom equipment, and shipping a proper enlarger is expensive as hell.
5) You live in one of those tiny closets that they call "urban apartments", and despite your best efforts, you were unable to convince your roommate/partner that a Beseler 23C is an appropriate permanent decoration for the bathroom. "Think of it as a conversation piece," you probably said, to no avail.
My quick responses to the above:
1) No. Real ones are better, and easier. Go for a real one.
2) Fair concern, but they're simpler than they look and very robust. Go for a real one.
3) Large format but no darkroom? Weird, but ok. Read on.
4) Absolutely, read on.
5) Welcome to the club... read on!
I was once very spoiled: I lived a short drive from my parents' house, they had a spare bedroom and bathroom larger than my current apartment, and professional photographers were unloading their darkrooms for $0.10/pound. Alas, I could not bring any of my enlargers or print processors with me when I moved across the ocean, and suddenly storage space was a *very big* issue. For the past decade I've been dreaming about getting back to printing, but it just wasn't practical.
I noticed this Intrepid thing a few years ago, and it seemed like a possible solution. I have strict requirements: my darkroom has to be in a bathroom shared with another human and a cat, cannot be setup permanently (or even overnight), and must be able to be completely stored away in a small closet. I needed something I could setup, use, teardown, and tuck away in a bookshelf. After three years of eyeing the thing, I finally decided to go for it... it was ten times the price of just buying a used Durst locally, but the storage problems dominated over the financials. Plus, I get to try out 4x5! Nice.
I bought all of the optional accessories from Intrepid... in for a penny, in for a pound (it was actually several hundred pounds). They leave you to solve two problems yourself: lenses, and a way to mount it.
Used enlarger lenses are typically abundant and fairly inexpensive. Intrepid provides an M39 recessed screw-mount board with the enlarger kit. I ordered a 50mm lens for enlarging 35mm, a 105mm for medium format since I want to cover up to 6x9, and for 4x5.... discovered that 150mm enlarger lenses are rare, expensive, and seldom available in M39. Crap. Ok, fine, I haven't actually shot any 4x5 yet so I'll save that for later. I did buy a 150mm taking lens to use it as a camera, and you can enlarge through that, though it's not really ideal.
Now, if you're paying careful attention, you'll notice that I've already made my first mistake. 50mm, the totally standard focal length for enlarging 35mm film, and the lenses that are most available and cheapest... hey, didn't Intrepid's website say something about the camera's minimum focal length? Oh yeah... 75mm. So my 50mm lens arrives and it can't focus. This is kind of on me for not paying attention, but also kind of on Intrepid for not pointing it out. I assumed the deeply recessed lens board was going to handle this, but it did not. Eventually my 105mm showed up, and that will work for 35mm as well, so long as you can get the enlarger head a meter above the surface... read on!
Getting the "enlarger head" (that's a giant 4x5 camera) above the projection surface... their cute little advertisements show it on a tripod with the legs sprawled out on the enlarging table. Ok, well my tripod legs sprawl right off of the edge of the only flat surface in my bathroom, and that is not going to work. Even if the table were deeper, my tripod's center post is not a meter long, so enlarging 35mm to 8x10 with a 105mm lens isn't an option. Plus, I have shelves over most of my counter, which limits where the tripod could even go. So it's time to start thinking about how to hold this thing up, and here are the options I considered:
1) Unextended tripod awkwardly sprawled on the table, trying to avoid projecting across its legs. Vertical changes are easy, but limited to the height of the center post.
2) Tripod on the floor next to the table. You get full tripod height, but... it's a pyramid. The higher it goes, the farther it pulls away from the table edge. So you need to have different lengths for the legs to bring it closer to the table, and any height changes require changing all three legs. The center post now moves diagonally. Vertical changes are a complete pain.
3) Buy a tripod with a center post that can pivot to horizontal. You get the full leg height, and can hold the camera horizontally over the table. The center post loses all vertical movement, so that has to be done by changing all three legs. The leg height probably isn't enough.
4) Same as 3 (horizontal tripod post), but stick a macro rail at the end to get a little bit of controlled vertical movement. But most macro rails aren't long enough to make this worthwhile.
5) Buy a copy stand; perfect vertical control. But I could only find copy stands that are ~75cm tall, and they are shockingly expensive, and they don't store well in my closet.
6) Buy a "tripod boom arm". This is so late down the list because I didn't know they existed, but of course this is what to do. The tripod is setup with equal-length legs, it keeps its vertical center post for easy vertical adjustments, and you add a horizontal boom arm sticking out over the table. Counter-balance the boom arm with a backpack full of books, and hope that nothing snaps in half.
I went for #6, and found a reasonably priced boom arm from a Chinese brand which seems to be of pretty nice quality. Of course, we are talking about a fully extended tripod with a far-extended boom arm and 2kg of camera hanging from it... the vibrations, man, the vibrations! You can imagine the scene of your beautifully projected image bouncing up and down like a child on a trampoline. And this was absolutely my fear, but, in practice, it turns out to not be that bad. It certainly shakes and vibrates every time you touch it, but it settles after a few seconds. When making a print, I just make sure not to touch *anything* for 10 seconds before flipping on the light. If you like to dance while your exposure is in progress, you might have some problems with this setup. Sand bags might help.
Alignment was another concern; I figured I would have to spend 45 minutes squaring the thing every time I set it up. Weirdly enough, this turned out to not be a problem at all. I just eyeball it, and it seems fine. I always check the grain focus in the center and all four corners before making a print to make sure nothing is wildly off. If you want it more accurate, you can use graph paper or a cutting mat with a grid to align it precisely. Your accuracy and stability will be limited by your tripod head; I'm using a fairly cheap ball-head, which surprisingly doesn't drift under the weight of the camera, but is very difficult to make small adjustments. A geared head would be much better.
Before the thing ever arrived, I assumed the little safelight built in to the controller would be too wimpy, and I bought a separate safelight. I was wrong, the built-in one is just fine on its own. My bathroom is quite long, though, so I'm running with both of them on opposite ends of the room. I did a 7-minute safelight test with both of them on, and there were no signs of fogging. You can absolutely get by with just the one they provide, though.
The controller is... fine. The timer is set via buttons. The buttons are unresponsive and ignore half of my inputs, so you really have to double-check that the settings are correct. You absolutely cannot operate it without looking. It takes quite a long time to change the time by more than a second or two. I think the timer moves in half seconds, but the steps are marked "0:00, 0:50, 1:00 1:50, 2:00, ...", and ":50" is not how you annotate half a second, so that's weird. I've never tried those half steps... I just stick to whole numbers. If you want arbitrary fractions of a second or f-stop-based timing, you're out of luck. The knobs for contrast and color are much more responsive and feel nice... I really wish time was on a knob. The "focus" button turns on the light for 60 seconds, which I find is a bit short since mucking around with tripods is slow and I want to check the focus in 5 spots.
A side-effect of having a "smart" controller is that you can't use any other darkroom timer. The light source doesn't just turn on when powered, so standard darkroom timers that control power via relays can't be used with this device. There is no way to save a "memory" of recently used times, so if you want to do something like an 18 second exposure followed by several 2-second burns, you will spend quite some time fiddling with the timer. There is no way to run the timer without the light, and changing the time is a hassle, so using it as a timer while you develop/fix the prints is also impractical. I don't have a development timer, and just count in my head.
The negative carriers are... less than perfect. They're just two long wooden boards taped together, which slide into the light source housing. Their length makes it difficult to work with short strips (I think single frames would be impossible). There are no alignment tabs. And, worst of all, if your negative strip is too long it will extend out of the carrier and cross the very rough edge of the camera's wooden frame and get scratched to oblivion. You have to be *very* careful when loading a long negative strip, and might have to unmount the light source to do it somewhat safely. The carriers do not have glass, so you may struggle with curved negatives.
The "run" button (which exposes for your chosen time), the "focus" button (which turns it on for 60 seconds), and the "reduce time" button are right next to each other and look and feel the same. I hit the wrong one sometimes, which is quite annoying... especially when I hit "focus" instead of "run" and ruin the print.
In my first printing session, I had trouble with the top third of my images being very underexposed. It wasn't light falloff in the corners, but clearly only affected one side. That hasn't happened since, and in retrospect I believe it was caused by my lack of familiarity with the 4x5 camera it's mounted to. The front standard has significant "fall" when first unfolded, and I'm guessing that I locked it in too low and got uneven illumination. You have to be careful to make sure the camera is perfectly squared.
So far I've been focusing on the practical challenges, limitations, and flaws. But once it's all setup and you've got your technique down... the darn thing makes prints. Perfectly normal, beautiful prints. It's not some Holga or Zorki of the enlarger world; your friends aren't going to look at the print on your wall and say "I see you used an Intrepid for this one...", and it won't bring shame on your family (well, maybe a little). The light source is strong and even, so the quality of your prints mostly comes down to the quality of your lens and your ability to limit vibrations. The bulk of these problems are things that you solve once when you first buy it. Now that I've figured out how to use it, I can setup the entire darkroom in 15 minutes, make lovely prints for a few hours, tear down the entire darkroom in 15 minutes, and it all fits in a small box on my bookshelf. I can do a printing session after work and by bedtime there is no sign that a darkroom was ever there. It is everything I wanted.
I only make 5x7 and 8x10 prints, so I can't comment on how it would handle larger sizes, but I think the light is plenty strong enough to go a bit bigger. This probably isn't the appropriate setup for poster-sized prints, but who knows? I have also only used it for B&W, so I can't comment on its performance with RA-4, but it does have a color mode. I've also only enlarged 35mm and 6x7 negatives; 4x5 is a future problem. I'm typically getting ~15-25s exposure times at f/11 for 8x10 enlargements of 35mm negatives onto RC paper.
Contrast is handled by varying the color of the LED light source rather than with filters, and appears to work fine with my multigrade papers. It also has a "white light" mode, which is handy for contact prints. I had no trouble contact printing a paper negative with that.
As a small bonus, the light source can also be used as a light table. I tried "scanning" negatives with a macro lens on my DSLR and got pretty decent results. That's not anything I'm particularly interested in, but it is handy to have the option. This is also convenient for just perusing your negatives, of course.
In summary, I strongly recommend this kit if you have some limiting factor that makes traditional enlargers impractical. If you have the space for a traditional one, though, they are generally less finicky and better, and often cheaper. I'm not sure about 4x5 enlargers; the Intrepid might be the easiest way to get in to that. Since the the Intrepid rigs are tiny and light, it's also a great solution if you want to split the cost of a darkroom with a few friends. You can literally fit an entire darkroom, enlarger and all, in a single duffel bag. If you're going on a road trip, you could reasonably bring the whole thing with you and print in hotel bathrooms. Maybe you could even print in the sleeper cabin of a train
-----
Coming back to that 50mm lens that couldn't focus: that really bothered me, and I insisted on making it work. The problem is that the closest mounting hole for the front standard isn't close enough to the film plane, but the bellows are absolutely able to compress more. So I build a little acrylic "compression bracket", which gives me a new mounting hole closer to the film plane, and allows the 50mm lens to focus. It's just two layers of acrylic glued to each other, with three holes drilled in it and an M6 nut epoxied into one of them. This allows for a much more reasonable (lower) head height when working with 35mm, particularly if you want to project an image larger than 8x10.
If you are planning to use a tripod, it's handy to remember the formula for enlarger head height to determine if your tripod will work for the sizes you want. The formula:
D = F + (2 + (1/M) + M)
Where D is the distance from easel (your print) to the negative carrier (top of the camera), F is the focal length of the enlarging lens, and M is the magnification ratio from film width to print width.
Your tripod needs to be able to reach a bit less than "D" high for a given lens and magnification. For instance, enlarging a 35mm negative to an 8x10 print is an M factor of 7.06, because a 35mm frame is 36mm wide, 8x10 paper is 254mm wide, and 254/36 = 7.06. If you use a 50mm lens, F=50mm and M=7.06, and you can calculate that D=460mm. You need a tripod height of 46cm, or about 18 inches. With a 105mm lens, that it comes out to 97cm or 38 inches. That 51cm/20in difference is substantial for tripods, so you can see why this little modification is useful.
This is about the conversion kit for Intrepid's 4x5 camera, which has carriers for 35mm, medium format, and 4x5. They also sell a little standalone enlarger that only does 35mm and medium format, which I haven't used. They share a control unit, so at least some of this commentary will apply to that one as well.
The kit is a simple two-piece device: an LED light source that replaces the ground glass on the back of the camera (locking into place with graflok clips), and a little digital controller box where you set times and contrast (or color), and turn the light on and off. The controller box also has a safelight built in. The negative carriers slide into a slot in the light source's frame.
The first question is why would you even consider buying this thing? There are, after all, "real" enlargers flooding the local classifieds. I can think of 5 reasons why you might:
1) You think a brand new product will be better made and/or easier to use than some old used clunker of an enlarger from 40 years ago.
2) You think "real" enlargers look confusing and complicated, and don't know how to tell if a used one will work.
3) You are buying a 4x5 camera anyway, don't already have a darkroom, and figure you might as well get an enlarger out of it.
4) You live in a place that doesn't have local classifieds full of cheap darkroom equipment, and shipping a proper enlarger is expensive as hell.
5) You live in one of those tiny closets that they call "urban apartments", and despite your best efforts, you were unable to convince your roommate/partner that a Beseler 23C is an appropriate permanent decoration for the bathroom. "Think of it as a conversation piece," you probably said, to no avail.
My quick responses to the above:
1) No. Real ones are better, and easier. Go for a real one.
2) Fair concern, but they're simpler than they look and very robust. Go for a real one.
3) Large format but no darkroom? Weird, but ok. Read on.
4) Absolutely, read on.
5) Welcome to the club... read on!
I was once very spoiled: I lived a short drive from my parents' house, they had a spare bedroom and bathroom larger than my current apartment, and professional photographers were unloading their darkrooms for $0.10/pound. Alas, I could not bring any of my enlargers or print processors with me when I moved across the ocean, and suddenly storage space was a *very big* issue. For the past decade I've been dreaming about getting back to printing, but it just wasn't practical.
I noticed this Intrepid thing a few years ago, and it seemed like a possible solution. I have strict requirements: my darkroom has to be in a bathroom shared with another human and a cat, cannot be setup permanently (or even overnight), and must be able to be completely stored away in a small closet. I needed something I could setup, use, teardown, and tuck away in a bookshelf. After three years of eyeing the thing, I finally decided to go for it... it was ten times the price of just buying a used Durst locally, but the storage problems dominated over the financials. Plus, I get to try out 4x5! Nice.
I bought all of the optional accessories from Intrepid... in for a penny, in for a pound (it was actually several hundred pounds). They leave you to solve two problems yourself: lenses, and a way to mount it.
Used enlarger lenses are typically abundant and fairly inexpensive. Intrepid provides an M39 recessed screw-mount board with the enlarger kit. I ordered a 50mm lens for enlarging 35mm, a 105mm for medium format since I want to cover up to 6x9, and for 4x5.... discovered that 150mm enlarger lenses are rare, expensive, and seldom available in M39. Crap. Ok, fine, I haven't actually shot any 4x5 yet so I'll save that for later. I did buy a 150mm taking lens to use it as a camera, and you can enlarge through that, though it's not really ideal.
Now, if you're paying careful attention, you'll notice that I've already made my first mistake. 50mm, the totally standard focal length for enlarging 35mm film, and the lenses that are most available and cheapest... hey, didn't Intrepid's website say something about the camera's minimum focal length? Oh yeah... 75mm. So my 50mm lens arrives and it can't focus. This is kind of on me for not paying attention, but also kind of on Intrepid for not pointing it out. I assumed the deeply recessed lens board was going to handle this, but it did not. Eventually my 105mm showed up, and that will work for 35mm as well, so long as you can get the enlarger head a meter above the surface... read on!
Getting the "enlarger head" (that's a giant 4x5 camera) above the projection surface... their cute little advertisements show it on a tripod with the legs sprawled out on the enlarging table. Ok, well my tripod legs sprawl right off of the edge of the only flat surface in my bathroom, and that is not going to work. Even if the table were deeper, my tripod's center post is not a meter long, so enlarging 35mm to 8x10 with a 105mm lens isn't an option. Plus, I have shelves over most of my counter, which limits where the tripod could even go. So it's time to start thinking about how to hold this thing up, and here are the options I considered:
1) Unextended tripod awkwardly sprawled on the table, trying to avoid projecting across its legs. Vertical changes are easy, but limited to the height of the center post.
2) Tripod on the floor next to the table. You get full tripod height, but... it's a pyramid. The higher it goes, the farther it pulls away from the table edge. So you need to have different lengths for the legs to bring it closer to the table, and any height changes require changing all three legs. The center post now moves diagonally. Vertical changes are a complete pain.
3) Buy a tripod with a center post that can pivot to horizontal. You get the full leg height, and can hold the camera horizontally over the table. The center post loses all vertical movement, so that has to be done by changing all three legs. The leg height probably isn't enough.
4) Same as 3 (horizontal tripod post), but stick a macro rail at the end to get a little bit of controlled vertical movement. But most macro rails aren't long enough to make this worthwhile.
5) Buy a copy stand; perfect vertical control. But I could only find copy stands that are ~75cm tall, and they are shockingly expensive, and they don't store well in my closet.
6) Buy a "tripod boom arm". This is so late down the list because I didn't know they existed, but of course this is what to do. The tripod is setup with equal-length legs, it keeps its vertical center post for easy vertical adjustments, and you add a horizontal boom arm sticking out over the table. Counter-balance the boom arm with a backpack full of books, and hope that nothing snaps in half.
I went for #6, and found a reasonably priced boom arm from a Chinese brand which seems to be of pretty nice quality. Of course, we are talking about a fully extended tripod with a far-extended boom arm and 2kg of camera hanging from it... the vibrations, man, the vibrations! You can imagine the scene of your beautifully projected image bouncing up and down like a child on a trampoline. And this was absolutely my fear, but, in practice, it turns out to not be that bad. It certainly shakes and vibrates every time you touch it, but it settles after a few seconds. When making a print, I just make sure not to touch *anything* for 10 seconds before flipping on the light. If you like to dance while your exposure is in progress, you might have some problems with this setup. Sand bags might help.
Alignment was another concern; I figured I would have to spend 45 minutes squaring the thing every time I set it up. Weirdly enough, this turned out to not be a problem at all. I just eyeball it, and it seems fine. I always check the grain focus in the center and all four corners before making a print to make sure nothing is wildly off. If you want it more accurate, you can use graph paper or a cutting mat with a grid to align it precisely. Your accuracy and stability will be limited by your tripod head; I'm using a fairly cheap ball-head, which surprisingly doesn't drift under the weight of the camera, but is very difficult to make small adjustments. A geared head would be much better.
Before the thing ever arrived, I assumed the little safelight built in to the controller would be too wimpy, and I bought a separate safelight. I was wrong, the built-in one is just fine on its own. My bathroom is quite long, though, so I'm running with both of them on opposite ends of the room. I did a 7-minute safelight test with both of them on, and there were no signs of fogging. You can absolutely get by with just the one they provide, though.
The controller is... fine. The timer is set via buttons. The buttons are unresponsive and ignore half of my inputs, so you really have to double-check that the settings are correct. You absolutely cannot operate it without looking. It takes quite a long time to change the time by more than a second or two. I think the timer moves in half seconds, but the steps are marked "0:00, 0:50, 1:00 1:50, 2:00, ...", and ":50" is not how you annotate half a second, so that's weird. I've never tried those half steps... I just stick to whole numbers. If you want arbitrary fractions of a second or f-stop-based timing, you're out of luck. The knobs for contrast and color are much more responsive and feel nice... I really wish time was on a knob. The "focus" button turns on the light for 60 seconds, which I find is a bit short since mucking around with tripods is slow and I want to check the focus in 5 spots.
A side-effect of having a "smart" controller is that you can't use any other darkroom timer. The light source doesn't just turn on when powered, so standard darkroom timers that control power via relays can't be used with this device. There is no way to save a "memory" of recently used times, so if you want to do something like an 18 second exposure followed by several 2-second burns, you will spend quite some time fiddling with the timer. There is no way to run the timer without the light, and changing the time is a hassle, so using it as a timer while you develop/fix the prints is also impractical. I don't have a development timer, and just count in my head.
The negative carriers are... less than perfect. They're just two long wooden boards taped together, which slide into the light source housing. Their length makes it difficult to work with short strips (I think single frames would be impossible). There are no alignment tabs. And, worst of all, if your negative strip is too long it will extend out of the carrier and cross the very rough edge of the camera's wooden frame and get scratched to oblivion. You have to be *very* careful when loading a long negative strip, and might have to unmount the light source to do it somewhat safely. The carriers do not have glass, so you may struggle with curved negatives.
The "run" button (which exposes for your chosen time), the "focus" button (which turns it on for 60 seconds), and the "reduce time" button are right next to each other and look and feel the same. I hit the wrong one sometimes, which is quite annoying... especially when I hit "focus" instead of "run" and ruin the print.
In my first printing session, I had trouble with the top third of my images being very underexposed. It wasn't light falloff in the corners, but clearly only affected one side. That hasn't happened since, and in retrospect I believe it was caused by my lack of familiarity with the 4x5 camera it's mounted to. The front standard has significant "fall" when first unfolded, and I'm guessing that I locked it in too low and got uneven illumination. You have to be careful to make sure the camera is perfectly squared.
So far I've been focusing on the practical challenges, limitations, and flaws. But once it's all setup and you've got your technique down... the darn thing makes prints. Perfectly normal, beautiful prints. It's not some Holga or Zorki of the enlarger world; your friends aren't going to look at the print on your wall and say "I see you used an Intrepid for this one...", and it won't bring shame on your family (well, maybe a little). The light source is strong and even, so the quality of your prints mostly comes down to the quality of your lens and your ability to limit vibrations. The bulk of these problems are things that you solve once when you first buy it. Now that I've figured out how to use it, I can setup the entire darkroom in 15 minutes, make lovely prints for a few hours, tear down the entire darkroom in 15 minutes, and it all fits in a small box on my bookshelf. I can do a printing session after work and by bedtime there is no sign that a darkroom was ever there. It is everything I wanted.
I only make 5x7 and 8x10 prints, so I can't comment on how it would handle larger sizes, but I think the light is plenty strong enough to go a bit bigger. This probably isn't the appropriate setup for poster-sized prints, but who knows? I have also only used it for B&W, so I can't comment on its performance with RA-4, but it does have a color mode. I've also only enlarged 35mm and 6x7 negatives; 4x5 is a future problem. I'm typically getting ~15-25s exposure times at f/11 for 8x10 enlargements of 35mm negatives onto RC paper.
Contrast is handled by varying the color of the LED light source rather than with filters, and appears to work fine with my multigrade papers. It also has a "white light" mode, which is handy for contact prints. I had no trouble contact printing a paper negative with that.
As a small bonus, the light source can also be used as a light table. I tried "scanning" negatives with a macro lens on my DSLR and got pretty decent results. That's not anything I'm particularly interested in, but it is handy to have the option. This is also convenient for just perusing your negatives, of course.
In summary, I strongly recommend this kit if you have some limiting factor that makes traditional enlargers impractical. If you have the space for a traditional one, though, they are generally less finicky and better, and often cheaper. I'm not sure about 4x5 enlargers; the Intrepid might be the easiest way to get in to that. Since the the Intrepid rigs are tiny and light, it's also a great solution if you want to split the cost of a darkroom with a few friends. You can literally fit an entire darkroom, enlarger and all, in a single duffel bag. If you're going on a road trip, you could reasonably bring the whole thing with you and print in hotel bathrooms. Maybe you could even print in the sleeper cabin of a train
-----
Coming back to that 50mm lens that couldn't focus: that really bothered me, and I insisted on making it work. The problem is that the closest mounting hole for the front standard isn't close enough to the film plane, but the bellows are absolutely able to compress more. So I build a little acrylic "compression bracket", which gives me a new mounting hole closer to the film plane, and allows the 50mm lens to focus. It's just two layers of acrylic glued to each other, with three holes drilled in it and an M6 nut epoxied into one of them. This allows for a much more reasonable (lower) head height when working with 35mm, particularly if you want to project an image larger than 8x10.
If you are planning to use a tripod, it's handy to remember the formula for enlarger head height to determine if your tripod will work for the sizes you want. The formula:
D = F + (2 + (1/M) + M)
Where D is the distance from easel (your print) to the negative carrier (top of the camera), F is the focal length of the enlarging lens, and M is the magnification ratio from film width to print width.
Your tripod needs to be able to reach a bit less than "D" high for a given lens and magnification. For instance, enlarging a 35mm negative to an 8x10 print is an M factor of 7.06, because a 35mm frame is 36mm wide, 8x10 paper is 254mm wide, and 254/36 = 7.06. If you use a 50mm lens, F=50mm and M=7.06, and you can calculate that D=460mm. You need a tripod height of 46cm, or about 18 inches. With a 105mm lens, that it comes out to 97cm or 38 inches. That 51cm/20in difference is substantial for tripods, so you can see why this little modification is useful.
Yep I go with that