Convert DeVere 504 to 10X10 Horizontal enlarger?

[Tin Can]

It occurred to me that I have all the parts necessary to do the conversion.

The main advantage of the 504 is that does not use weight as counterbalance and has very tight clearances that are easily adjustable.

The column could be fitted to a table with wheels and floor rails, to make nearly any size enlargement.

Has anyone done this?

[Greg]

Remember something similar to this being done at the Rochester Institute of Technology when I was a student there in the 1970s. Maybe someone else who was at RIT at that time remembers more details than I.

[Peter De Smidt]

Basically, this is an 508H. The column and lens stage are the same as on a 504. Maybe there's a spacer to move the lens out a bit. The negative stage is bigger, of course, and the slight source slides on the column. It is attached to the negative stage with springs. A cam + lever is used to back the light source away from the negative stage. Slide in the negative carrier, and release the same lever. The springs pull the lightsource tight against the carrier. One thing to think about, the 810 is motorized, both the whole cabinet and the lens stage. That way you can focus when standing by the easel. It wouldn't be too hard to set up a stepper motor system to control focus. This is what mine looked like: http://www.imgrum.net/tag/810h

[Tin Can]

Getting an error from that link. "sorry, too many requests. Please try again later."

[Tin Can]

Basically, this is an 810H. The column and lens stage are the same as on a 504. Maybe there's a spacer to move the lens out a bit. The negative stage is bigger, of course, and the slight source slides on the column. It is attached to the negative stage with springs. A cam + lever is used to back the light source away from the negative stage. Slide in the negative carrier, and release the same lever. The springs pull the lightsource tight against the carrier. One thing to think about, the 810 is motorized, both the whole cabinet and the lens stage. That way you can focus when standing by the easel. It wouldn't be too hard to set up a stepper motor system to control focus. This is what mine looked like: http://www.imgrum.net/tag/810h

Sounds very possible to build. It doesn't have to make huge enlargements, obviously just get it closer to the easel.

[Tin Can]

Heck, we can buy one in UUk.

http://www.odyssey-sales.co.uk/products/enlargers/devere-508-h.htm

[ic-racer]

I found this picture of one on my hard drive:

[Tin Can]

I found this picture of one on my hard drive:

1010ET?

Thanks, I am looking for pics. Seems kinda rare, even in pictures!

[Mick Fagan]

I have used three different DeVere 8x10 horizontal enlargers, all three were able to take a 10" by 10" negative, otherwise you couldn't do a portrait or landscape version of a negative, think about it. From memory, (getting a bit hard as it is close to 30 years ago) the lighting was a row of 4 x 250W globes down each side, meaning once a globe went, we replaced all 8 of them. An expensive item to replace back then.

Probably one of the best things we had, was a pair of spectacle binoculars. These made focusing pretty easy. One has too understand that the paper was sometimes out of the reach of the cable, especially in the far corners of the print. Using a pair of spectacle binoculars made it reasonably easy to get pretty good to virtually correct focus.

Focusing, using the cable remote, is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Basically there is a motor (or motors) moving things and as you take your finger off the button, the motor, sort of slows to a stop. One needed to anticipate roughly where it was going to stop. Usually after a couple of goes, one basically got the focus about right. Critical focusing, when using one of these units for quite large prints, think 1.8m x 6m single colour prints, is another ball game. These prints were usually never going to have people standing 1 metre from them eyeballing whether or not they were in critical focus. Most times I think people were at least 10m from a print, therefore apparent and/or real sharpness, was never a problem.

It was reasonably common to have 10 minute to 20 minute exposures, then there was burning in.

161387

Mick.

[MartinP]

Wouldn't it be easier to work from an old monorail camera instead? The light source might be one of the larger lightpads, as mentioned many times in LFF, then focussing using the bellows of the re-purposed monorail (with the aid of a pair of cheap binoculars on a tripod) and image distance modified on a few metres of secondhand dolly-track from some old cine/video supplier. Plus lots of space, of course. . . .

Edit: For mural sized prints, the light-source would be the problem area, otherwise getting the right glass for the neg-carrier might be the awkward bit?