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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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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