DIY darkroom easel?

totifoto

totifoto

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Anyone here made there own darkroom easel?

I just put up my darkroom again and the only thing I need is the easel.

I´m broke and live in Iceland so ordering some easel online is out of the question, sending cost and taxes are way to high.

If anyone here has made one and is willing to share I would really appreciate it 🙂
 
You can make a fixed-format "easel" from mounting card. Ask the art-shop to cut a matte with a hole the size of your paper minus 10 or 12mm. Aligning the paper can then be done by hinging the card-with-the-hole to another piece (or foamboard is better than matte-board for larger sizes, as it's more rigid) having carefully marked lines to show where you need to put the paper. Before I had a 16x20" easel I used this method for masking large prints, so it can work fine.

I suppose it would also be possible to build up a right-angle corner from foamcore, on a drawing board or similar, then use those edges to guide two large "L" shapes of black matte-board to form the picture area. The paper alignment would be a little more tricky though.

Edit: And not forgetting the obvious piece of plate glass! You will be using a piece of glass about 25x30cm for making your contact-prints, so you can use that same piece to hold the paper still and flat (indeed, probably flatter than with a normal easel) on the baseboard to make borderless prints.
 
I've been printing without an easel, just using black electrical tape on the enlarger base board so that I can line up the paper easily. As a result my borders are a little messy, and takes a while to line up the paper accurately but still possible to print without one.

Having an easel would definitely be way more convenient, still looking for a cheap second hand easel to appear locally.
 
I use a piece of appropriately sized plywood with strips of wood fastened to 2 adjacent sides to act as stops for the paper. There are 3 little cork feet on the bottom so it doesn't rock. RC paper lies flat enough to just lay there. I compose with a scrap paper the same size as I want the finished print, then turn off the lights and replace it with the paper I'm printing on.

I made 2 sizes: one for up to 8x10, the other for up to 16x20.
 
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