I BUILT A COMPLETE PHOTO DARKROOM IN A REMOTE MOUNTAIN CABIN
(Page 2 of 3)
January/February 1976
By Roger L. Gee
As it turned out, making the actual conversion (installing the new bulb and hooking it to George's extracted battery) was the easy part. The hard part was "fine tuning" the substituted light source. Regular enlarger bulbs, you see, are specially designed to "diffuse" their illumination far more than my battery-powered substitute. My backwoods rig worked, in other words but it also produced an indelible, dark "hot spot" right in the center of all my prints.
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I initially tried to offset this by lowering the new bulb in the enlarger's housing, installing an extra condenser, and lining the housing with aluminum foil to further reflect (and thereby diffuse) the light.
When that wasn't enough, I inserted a homemade bellows between the 25 watt bulb and the condensers so that by moving the light source around as a print is being made I can manually diffuse the enlarger's output of light. The idea works beautifully and, as far as I'm concerned, all smaller enlargers should have this feature to eliminate hot spots.
George's transplanted battery, of course, usually runs down after powering my jerry-built enlarger for two or three days. But that's no big problem. I just put it back in the car and take a drive up the mountain to admire a Siskiyou sunset which is generally all it takes to put a charge back into the storage cells.
The chemicals I need for my darkroom work are brought up to proper temperatures on a wood-burning cook stove (which always gives me a good excuse to throw some bread or a couple of pies in the oven "as long as we're firing up the stove anyway"). This sounds a lot more crude than it really is: I've found this simple method of warming darkroom solutions can be regulated well enough to maintain the close temperature ranges required for making color prints (it's almost as easy, in fact, to process color transparencies on my backwoods chemical warmer as it is to run off a batch of black and white film).
My print dryer is a line, some clothespins, and a few blotters and I mount and seal color slides myself (it saves a lot of money) with an old-fashioned "sad" iron that we heat on our trusty wood burning stove.
