Build Your Own Home Darkroom by Lista Duren & Will McDonald

Author:Lista Duren & Will McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-936262-04-8
Publisher: Amherst Media

The wall mount

Most enlarger columns lean out from the wall, putting a heavy off-balance load on the mounting bracket. Because an enlarger must be held absolutely still for good printing results, the main considerations in designing a wall mount are strength and stability.

The shelf itself must be sturdy—it must not bend or vibrate and the wall attachments must be firm. We've made the shelf out of 2 x 10 lumber and braced it to keep it from sagging or tilting forward. The shelf is assembled and attached to the structural part of the wall with long lag bolts.

Guy wires

An enlarger wall mount is not necessarily any more sturdy than a built-in cabinet or a solidly built desk, so you may find that vibrations in your enlarger column are making your prints fuzzy. You can avoid this problem by stabilizing the top of the enlarger column with guy wires to the wall. This technique, described on p. 75, also works to stabilize a table-mounted enlarger.

Size

The wall mount is 30 inches long. This is an arbitrary length chosen because you can build it out of one 8-foot length of lumber and because, in most of the locations you might choose for an enlarger, you would be able to tie into the structural part of the wall twice in the 30-inch span of the shelf. Measure the space available in your darkroom. You can make the wall mount shorter if you need to.

Next, check to be sure your shelf will be long enough to tie into your wall structure at two points (see "Locating the wall studs" on the following page).

Choosing a suitable wall

The walls in your darkroom are most likely to be hollow stud walls. A stud wall is built of vertical pieces of 2 x 4 lumber (called studs) at intervals inside the wall; it is covered with wallboard, plaster, or paneling. The instructions in this chapter assume that you are attaching your wall mount to a stud wall. The first step, locating the studs, is described on the next page.

If your wall is brick or concrete, consider changing your darkroom plan so that you can mount the enlarger on a stud wall. It is possible to mount onto a brick or concrete wall using lag bolts and expansion shields. However, you will need special tools for drilling into the wall, and the skills involved are beyond the scope of this book.

Shelf height

You can mount your enlarger shelf right above your counter or higher on the wall for making larger prints, but remember that as you raise the shaft of the enlarger above the counter you're also increasing the size of the smallest prints you can make. The table on page 77 tells you the lens-to-easel distance required for different-size prints. Before you mount your shelf to the wall, check to be sure that your enlarger head can go high and/or low enough to make prints the sizes you want. Also check to see if you will be able to reach the enlarger controls when the head is raised for large prints.

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