anybody shock mounted a vxl beseler top and bottom

[Gregg Cook]

I am trying to envision my perfect mount for wall mounting the big beseler.

I want a cushion bottom and top.

cables at the top, and metal or wood and styrofoam and or rubber to cushion the bottom mount to the chassis.

any good ideas, or proven mounts.

[aduncanson]

High school students used to make holograms on a plywood platform resting on a partially inflated inner tube. The allowable vibration was a fraction of a wavelength of light. But your enlarger baseboard and column would need to be rigidly connected.

[Gregg Cook]

yes I intended to mount the baseboard and column together and the shock stuff underneath it.

I get vibrations from trucks and stuff in my house as a busy street is in front of the house.

[ic-racer]

Try to find a cushioning material that has some intrinsic damping properties. I think the reason most enlargers are rigid mounted is because any vibrations of the enlarger would tend to persist with a cushioned mounting. Since you are trying to keep the vibrating wall from affecting the enlarger, it sounds a cushioned mounting may help. I'll be curious as to how it works.

If you have not already seen it, McMaster Carr has a reasonable selection of vibration control components with various damping characteristics. What you don't want to wind up with is an enlarger that keeps bouncing around every time it is touched.

[Gregg Cook]

now we are talking, the style 5 grommet between the enlarger and the wood or Metal lower mounting bracket. Maybe something else like that on the eye bolts into the wall studs to cable mount the top of the enlarger.

[Rob Hale]

Hi Greg,
Umm you will need to isolate the entire system, the top of the mast, the bottom of the mast and the easel platform. One of my clients ( via cad software ) got into this with their machines, tricky. It’s very ease to make things worse before you make them better. I see you are from Helena is that where the mount pops it top and if so are you on a lot of pumice ? We know a bit about pumice in the BOP down here in NZ. North Auckland clay is much quieter.
One plan which can work well this to float the whole enlarger so that it all vibrates at the same frequency there by the light path and the neg and paper all move in the same direction at the same time, needless to say that the whole floating structure needs to ridge in it self. If you have commercial needs there are companies who specialize pneumatic harmonically balanced mounting blocks, a bit out of my range. If it’s road traffic then Another plan print at night / or early morning.

Best Regards Rob

[Gregg Cook]

No Rob, I am in Helena AR, On the big muddy. I thought that I might need to isolate the whole thing. Road traffic is my main concern, I am on silty soil. I usually try to print late night or early morn. Now I am printing on the floor, less than ideal, hurts the neck after a night of focusing...

[darter]

Try to find a cushioning material that has some intrinsic damping properties. I think the reason most enlargers are rigid mounted is because any vibrations of the enlarger would tend to persist with a cushioned mounting. Since you are trying to keep the vibrating wall from affecting the enlarger, it sounds a cushioned mounting may help. I'll be curious as to how it works.

If you have not already seen it, McMaster Carr has a reasonable selection of vibration control components with various damping characteristics. What you don't want to wind up with is an enlarger that keeps bouncing around every time it is touched.

I wonder if any of those can be affixed to tripod legs? or would that end up creating a tripod that vibrates in a breeze?

[aduncanson]

You are taking on a pretty knotty problem here, that is the problem of isolating the enlarger from the motion of the base it rests on. The difficulty is that for base frequencies lower than sqrt(2) times the natural frequency of the isolation system (the isolated mass on its springy suspension) the base motion is passed through the isolator unattenuated if not amplified.

I would guess that the vibration caused by passing traffic would contain a broad range of mostly low frequencies. The excitation frequencies that reach your enlarger may be greatly influenced by the properties of of your floor and walls. The frequencies you are most concerned with are the ones that would excite resonances in your enlarger. Imagine how the enlarger would react if you were to tap the lamp head left-right, forward-back, or up-down. My guess is that the response frequencies would be pretty low, probably between 4 and 20 Hz.

If the responses are as low as 4 Hz. then you need for your isolated system to have a natural frequency below about 2.8 Hz to do you good, not harm. For isolators using linear compliance components (E.G., springs) there is an inescapable relationship between resonant frequency and static deflection (the degree that the springs move when the enlarger is set upon them.) For a linear system to provide a resonant frequency of 2.8 Hz, it will have a static deflection of nearly 1.25 inches. That is, it must be very softly sprung. Hence the utility of the inner tube system I suggested earlier. A set of smallish rubber isolators is unlikely to help. (Many subtle and unstated assumptions are implied in all of the above.)

What else might you do? You might try to stiffen the enlarger's baseboard, column and the junction between the two, so that the enlarger's resonances are higher and easier to filter. I can imagine bolting the baseboard firmly to a very stiff light base with a very stiff superstructure rigidly attached and tied to the column at several points along its height. If you can raise the enlarger's resonances to 20Hz, then the minimum static deflection of the suspension is reduced to about 1/16th of an inch, which might be achievable with smallish isolators.

Good Luck!