I've made some last minute murals where I work by using an MXT flipped horizontal and projected onto a wall. In our old darkroom--they used kodak mural paper and kodlith in rolls and actually used an MXII mounted to a stand, with an overhead rolling "easel" of sorts---that was a sheet of plywood hanging from an overhead track. This ran out--aligned to the enlarger. On the plywood, they used a piece of one-inch gatorfoam and pushpins to hold the paper in place. They actually made full 4x8 sized prints and processed them by hand in 2 5x9 foot sinks....
Now our new facility was designed about 25 years ago (on paper) by the folks using this old darkroom. They dreamed of horizontal enlargers and kreonite machines....the new lab is a long, deep cavernous room with a false sheetrock wall for projection, and an alcove for the processor. The floors are concrete as well.
Times change though--and the murals were all farmed out by the time the building was finished. The money for the horizontal enlarger went elsewhere. We got a processor though, as well as some nifty kreonite stations for a set of new MXTs.
The old MXII came up from the other lab---in a pinch we have used this by hauling it out to the middle of the room and getting it at the right distance for the mural. Then using tape measures basically, squares and levels--we get the thing aligned as best possible. We make a test projection and mark off on the wall with gaffer tape the boundaries of the print. Now, we use pushpins or tape actjually to hold the paper. In the past, we've used kodabrome RC, or MGIII mural paper--only because we had it. Our processor is 20 inches, so we gridded the wall off in sections and made them one at a time, with overlap. It's a two person affair--one person mans the enlarger, the other is out at the wall with a grain focuser. Same goes for puttingg the paper up, and processing--two people. It takes some co-ordination and a lot of patience and determination to get the thing done. It's not fun. In fact, the times we've done this have been in partial protest more or less--something that *had* to be done.
Some problems? Well--for one thing, we had to use condensers instead of the dichro heads. We use a glass carrier for the negs--all 4x5, btw. The times become very long, so we found that the 2 thomas duplex's were too much for the room--had to douse one, and in the end, almost had to work in the dark, for the kodabrome, or else it would fog.
We also made two 4x6 or so sized prints out of multiple sheets of 20x24 and tiled them together by mounting...bascially another late night fiasco, with no larger sheets on hand.
So--I've done it with MXIIs--haven't enjoyed it, the work didn't look bad, good enough considering I s'pose. Wasn't what I wanted to ideally do--but sometimes you don't have a choice. fwiw---before we got a large stat camera--we made film pos & negs for silkscreening signage to walls this way--by bumping negs up in size with sheets of kodalith shot to repro ratios and then using the MXII and the track easel with kodalith in rolls. Real down & dirty stuff. It worked---was on display for years, decades actually...people don't really care how something is done in the end, I only write this because it's a water-cooler type story of shoestring operations....
