UV light box

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And they can all add up.

Yes they do! I started out with a smaller UV LED light suspended maybe 50cm above the print, using a contact print frame. I soon decided that if I was going to commit to this process, I needed to make it faster. So I got bigger lights, hung them a few inches above the print frame, and invested in a vacuum frame. That got me down to 22 seconds, and I can make much larger prints.
 

koraks

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Yes, that's the way it tends to develop! It's the same here; I test with a smaller scale light source and then scale it up and optimize it if I like it.
 

carlj

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It if works, it works! I don't have experience with FP4+ for this particular purpose in the way you develop it. When I frequently did salted paper, I used to develop for about twice as long as recommended for normal development. Pyrocat 1+1+100 at 14 minutes for this film sounds on the short side to me, but you've got the negatives and I don't!



The problem with many of those fixtures sold on eBay, Amazon, AliExpress etc. is their overly optimistic power ratings. To give an example: very recently I picked up an array of 365nm + 400nm dual wavelength floodlights from AliExpress. They're advertised as "300W" units. I knew from earlier experience with an identical unit at only 400nm wavelength that the true power dissipation of the unit was only 75W - so 75% less than advertised. When I received the dual wavelength units last week and put them to the test, I arrived at a real power rating of only 32W. A further complication was that the fixture included a transparent plastic faceplate & lens assembly. This material blocks virtually all 365nm light, further reducing its actual efficiency.

This is all to say that comparing LED fixtures is tricky. Comparing the fixture I wrote about to my home-built 100W (actual, real-life Watts) exposure unit, of course the comparison was totally out of whack.

A further complication is that 365nm LEDs are currently still far less efficient than 400nm LEDs. For processes that are sensitive across a broad bandwidth (e.g. Van Dyke, Kallitype) a 400nm LED unit will almost always compare favorably to a 365nm unit of a similar power rating.

I don't have hands-on experience with that Everbeam fixture, but if I had one, I'd definitely measure its power consumption and open the unit up to analyze its circuitry and get an impression of its actual potential. There may be good reasons why a unit sold as a 100W unit performs no better than a decently engineered and accurately rated 10W unit. But it depends on a whole slew of factors and that makes such a comparison often too difficult to understand/interpret well for the average alt. process printer.

The issue is, sadly, rather complex. The short of it is that if you get long exposures with that unit, then all I can say is that I don't doubt your observations and the fact that someone else reports much shorter exposures with another unit of the same power rating (and another process) just doesn't say much.



I'm frankly not too worried about this. Salted paper works fine if dried completely. Working with silver gel negatives generally already gives some margin for variation and that tends to swamp more minor effects such as the ones you mention. When I frequently did salt, my exposures were 10-15 minutes. The only thing that really influenced them was the negative. All other parameters had marginal effects at best.
Mind you, I understand and accept that processes like Pt/Pd and a couple of others are more prone to this issue since they're often practiced at higher humidity levels that are not always sustainable during long exposures.

Hi Koraks, I'm willing to bet you're right about my development times being too short for salt (and I think may also be contributing to the long exposure time under my UV LEDs). Sure, some negatives may have worked by happy chance (which probably kept me from trying longer times) but reading, again, about salt print negatives using PyrocatHD I'm pretty clearly on the short side. I'm going to try developing longer with Pyrocat HD 2:2:100 (following Sandy King's Pyrocat HD dev chart over on unblinkingly.com and salt print negative development times referenced elsewhere). I've also read many (some?) rate their film closer to box speed with these longer development times and I'm assuming I may have to experiment a bit to figure out what works.

Thanks!
 

koraks

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Sounds good; keep at it! At some point it'll start to work reliably. Try to stick with one film and perhaps also one developer. I'm usually skeptical about the whole "don't change anything" advice, but when it comes to salted paper, it really is true. Have fun!
 
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For those of you building UV LED boxes: I was finally able to locate a source for 365nm UV LED light strips from a manufacturer in China. Jon Cone charges US$212 for a 5-meter strip. The direct supplier's price for the same strip: US$43.


These lights look identical to the ones Cone sells: 365nm LEDs on 8mm strips, 5 meters long, with 3 LEDs per inch. Clay Harmon and I put them on Clay's bench and compared them to the Cone LEDs in Clay's light box. We could not tell a difference. And both put out roughly equivalent amounts of UV light, according to Clay's UV light meter.

Since these lights are less than one-quarter of the price Cone charges, for apparently identical lights, these lights should put powerful UV boxes within reach of most people looking to build UV exposure boxes on a budget.

Note that these are 365nm lights, which are required for working with photopolymer plates for photogravure work. The same supplier also sells 5-meter strips of 395nm lights, which should work fine for other alt processes, for $24.

If you need an enclosure for housing the strips, Clay sells them as kits:

 
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