when Leica and beseler enlarger fails

At first the bulb in my Leitz V35 enlarger gone. I switched to Beseler 23CIII and after several prints the same, pufffff. No spare bulb. Phone, internet, e-bay,.... Than I went in my bathroom and took one regular bulb off its nest and screwed into beseler. and to prevent projection of the balb wire on the paper I cut tracing paper and inserted into filter drawer to produce diffuse light. I made a print and there was really absolute no difference between prints with special bulb (and special $$$) and just regular one ($0.7) even I expected focus shift due to different spectrums. Just now thinking to ungrade and my Leitz enlarger too.

www.Leica-R.com

Frosted or clear blub?

The main difference between simple enlarger bulbs and household bulbs, is that the enlarger bulbs have more dense frosting to even out the light, and they do not have an imprint on the end, which can create uneven-ness in the light. If you have found a solution that produces even illumination of your negative, there is no reason to not use what you can easily get, particularly if you are just doing black and white. Most color heads use small quartz low-voltage lamps anyway, and you could not easily substitute a household bulb.

It is clear bulb. If I remove matt paper (tracing paper) no enlargement, for bulb wire is traced on the paper. i am also making now some design to use just simple halogen lamp in my Leitz V35 enlarger. there are really no need for such rare and expensive bulbs. Even in color photogrpahy some change in filtration applied can accomodate cheap bulb.
www.Leica-R.com

My Durst uses expensive bulbs for it's colour head. Two that can easily cost more then $20. OTOH they last quite a while. Rated at 50 hours. Considering how short colour enlargements are that's a LOT of prints.

Or you can keep your eyes open and find bulbs for much less then normal. No reason to wait until a bulb blows to get a backup.

The problem with V35's is they changed mounts and bulbs so that there are two systems in play. The older mount won't fit the currently available bulbs. The new mounts are almost impossible to obtain. I think I got the last one from Leica about two years ago so you'll have to go into the e-bay marketplace to possibly find one. My feeling is that if you have a 75 watt bulb and can mount it into your enlarger and you use split grade printing technique using only two filter settings you could get around the problem. The only hesitation is whether using more popular higher voltage lamps would damage the enlarger either to the electric wiring or by putting out too much heat into the foam box mixing chamber - not to mention to the film below...I found a real dilemma in trying to cope with the brightness as it is since it required f.11 or f.16 for almost all 8x10's or smaller with normal density negs
Shelly

One work around for bright bulbs is to use a long life bulb. As it was explained to me, they drop the brightness down to extend the life of the bulb. I decided to go with the brighter 75 watt for my V35. Got mine from http://replacementlightbulbs.com