Does anyone have images of a De Vere 108 enlarger?

"Better get looking for some bellows". Found some!

Well, it didn't take much looking, just a quiet cogitation with a brew. The bellows are right there!

He's my plan: pick up the new lamp house, condenser et al and turn it upside down.

I converted the 54 to LED and to be honest it's got too many lumen, but the same would be fine if going larger in terms of neg and print size, so:

Attachment 181003

I'll go with Randy's suggestion, make the base board; then I'll take out the condenser lens, attach what was the lamphouse stage (and will now be the lens stage) to the lens stage adjuster, and attach the condenser stage (which will now be the lamphouse) to the lamphouse adjuster and voila!

I'll start a thread on the DIY section for this build.

From the UK auction site:
Attachment 181654Attachment 181655Attachment 181656Attachment 181657

Whoa, thanks Luis!

Looks not unlike what I've conjured up:

Attachment 182565

I've used the filter draw upside down with a devere 54 negative holder in an adapter plate:

Attachment 182566

Needs an inner door on my dark room to give it a test:

Attachment 182567
Back

Attachment 182568
Front!

:cool:

Just looked at the date on that last post..... about a year ago!

Done some faffing in the mean time. I got the cobbled up device working and did some prints, all I can say is I made some pieces of paper that had images on them :) which is fine. The images had poor contrast, I now find due to the particular LED source I used. (I got lucky with my de Vere 45 and an off the shelf LED that worked with variable contrast filters, the one I used for this 108 unfortunately didn’t, hey ho).

Then I was getting a bad vignette because a part of the lamp house was shading the light from the source; easily fixed with a jig saw. Good job this 10x8 enlarger was £80 and not £800....

I’m now redoing the upper lamp house (I’ve made two, one is a box with diffuser stuff off the LED downlighter which works fabulously - very even light at the paper - and an upper one that has the actual light source.) The new light source will be a gz 6.35 lamp specific to VC paper use. Looking about the web for a suitable bulb holder, connector and 240-12v transformer, seems like this lamp is used in projectors so that’s where I’m heading.

I’ll post some more pics when it’s all nailed together for those who are interested but it looks a bit like those images posted by Luis ATM.

Happy Sunday everyone !

R

What light source are you using? The ones I posted looks like a cold light head. L

The original equipment I received had a lamp house with two gigantic condenser lenses, so were lit by an incandescent bulb. My smaller De Vere 45 was cold cothode.

Don't know if the lamphouse I have actually goes with the rest. I now have a lamphouse with a photography dedicated halogen lamp, a load of diffusion, the original condenser tube and more diffusion over the negative stage.

The LED set up I had illuminated well, it was just the wrong wavelength so I got low contrast and no reaction to VC filtration. The new bulb is the correct wavelength so we shall see.....

Ok people what on earth am I missing or doing wrong? I’ve been at this months. I can’t get contrast!

I’m using ilford multi grade papers and chemistry, ilford below the lens filters. I have an incandescent bulb in the enlarger.

On virtually every neg I get poor contrast, even at grade 5. There is very little separation or difference between 1 and 5, they are all just muddy. I’ve had LEDs, halogen and incandescent bulbs in now, NO change, except in exposure etc. I’ve played about with diffusion material.

It’s as if the multi grade isn’t working. Even high contrast negs come out muddy. I can’t get even close to soot and snow. Grade 5 looks like 3.

It’s doing my head in, I feel like giving up and chucking the lot in the bin and walking away from analogue.

I want to split grade like I did with medium format, I’ve tried the negs I could split grade and ...... no contrast! Wtf!!!!!
Help.

Thanks Greg. Same safelight (Paterson) for years, but yes, will do.

I’ll double check for darkroom light leaks too.



Rob

Pictures would be helpful. Is your developer at the correct temp?Cold developer will give muddy prints as the Hydroquinone only works over a certain temperature. How old is the paper? How far away is the safelight? Maybe develop a sheet straight out of the box to see if the paper has any fogging.

Thanks Andrew and all.

Just a wee update....

As can be seen from the dates, the tempo of this odyssey is glacial; but having said that I have good progress.

On the above suggestions I went back to a basic and checked for light leaks, and found many minor ones adding up to a lot. I’ve rebuilt the enlarger, twice, and scratch built a new bellows (tedious, time consuming job but ultimately very satisfying and successful) and moved the entire darkroom. I now can get decent, contrasty prints....... off older negatives from my Mamiya C330. My LF negs are still not what I want.

I’m now on a quest for the same well exposed negatives from my 5x7/4x5 Kodak - Schneider - copal combo.

I’ve my Weston, Pentax and Nikon exposure meters; I’ve my Ansel “the negative” and a pile of fresh 4x5. Now to do some standardising experiments and find out what my true film speed is with all this ancient gear..... wish me luck!

Btw I’ve checked, checked and checked again that the camera is light tight, it’s just my technique imho.