The darkroom is finally finished! I installed all drainage today playing lego with different pvc pipes, marvel adapters, u-traps, y-connectors, etc – you name it. The gigantic 20×24″ print washer still needs some caulking for the glass dividers, but it is minor. Finally I can use my Jobo CPE-2 to develop some film.

Now when the wet side (room) is finished I can apply my construction “momentum” to design and build the dry side (room): finish UV light source, build print dryer, print coating desk, computer desk and stands for assortment of Epson prints I have.

I spent most of the week designing and building UV light source for contact printing. That will be on “dry side” of my darkroom – actually it will be in a completely different room than wet side (sinks) of my darkroom. The masterpiece of any dry side of any darkroom is a photo enlarger. I decided to skip this piece of equipment and replace this part of the process with contact printing. But you need a pretty big UV light source to make contact prints. Here it is: it is able to handle 20×24″ prints in 24×28″ contact frame. It has 16 24″ fluorescent tubes – black lights, 8 electronic ballasts, 8 fans to cool the lights and 2 power supplies to power the fans. It is almost done. I just need to add cover and build a stand for it.

Also, I almost finished gigantic vertical cascade print washer for 20×24″ prints. And of course it is made of plywood and covered with epoxy paint. I just need to hook up drainage for the washer.

Oh, and I built a new computer. Yes, digital darkroom is well and alive and it even got better. With 24GB of memory and SDD drive my Photoshop is chewing gigabyte images much faster now.

New darkroom sinks have finally made their way from the garage where they have been made into the darkroom. Two sinks will hold five 20×24″ trays (actually the trays are 24×28″). I wanted to make even larger prints but due to the small space of the room 20×24″ prints will be the limit. I’m making a cascading print washer now. And now it’s time to construct a masterpiece out of PVC pipes for the drainage.

Time flies… I have been working on my new darkroom but have not posted any images of my work. Most of the time I spent building two sinks out of plywood and then sanding and coating them with several layers of shellac, polyurethane paint and epoxy resin. 2 gallons of paint and 3 gallons of epoxy resin. Then I installed a ceiling in my space. And 2 pieces of 4×8′ plywood to mount all equipment. I had a lot of fun soldering copper pipes for water plumbing: there were a lot of corners, t-joints and thread adapters. Oh, and filters for cold and hot water are also in place. And on a top of that Wing Lynch electronic water temperature controller I bought on eBay. And exhaust ventilation all finished too. Everything is ready for the sinks!

It is nice and clean now: I painted the walls and the door. Plus new floor is black and white now – pretty appropriate since I’ll be doing mostly black and white prints here. Oh, and I started laying out ventilation. It is time to build darkroom sinks!

New drywall is in place, patched and ready for the prime coat. Also, I installed a new lightproof door (it did not get into the picture).

Framing for the drywall is ready and all electric wiring is finished.

I started to build a new darkroom to process silver and platinum prints. Thank goodness Midwest houses have the basements. This is the blank slate and I will continue to post pictures with the progress. But even to get to this point I had to move water heater from the middle of the room to side wall. Plus electric wiring is almost done by now.

Chlorophyll and blood (hemoglobin) are nearly identical substances. They differ by only single atom out of 137 atoms in each of their molecular structures: the hub of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while in chlorophyll it is one atom of magnesium. Just as chlorophyll is green because magnesium absorbs all but the green light spectrum, blood is red because iron absorbs all but the red. Chlorophyll is green blood. It is designed to capture light; blood is designed to capture oxygen.