Made a few more changes. While driving home from work today, I realized that the table never needs to go above ~30 inches, and the lens stage never needs to be more than ~600mm from the negative stage. With that in mind, I split the column into two sections, one for the table, and one for the head and lens stage. Each section has a single motor and lead screw mounted to it, which drive the table on the lower section and the head on the upper section. The head now has a motor attached to it which drives a smaller lead screw for moving the lens stage up and down relative to the head. Three more benefits of this modification are that 1). It will be easier for the arduino controlling the motors to know where each stage is and prevent them from running into each other and causing damage, 2). The column can now be split into two pieces for transport. A ~3ft piece and a ~5ft piece. I did this because a lab in New Zealand contacted me asking if I would consider selling any enlargers, and I realized that even though I don't plan to build many, if someone needs it shipped, freight costs go up a bunch for objects over 8ft, which the previous column was. And finally 3). the top half can be used on its own as a wall mount enlarger.
[Edit: I'm also wondering if I want to make it any taller... the current max height from table to light source is 81.5 inches, and to make a 40x50 print distance of at least 85 inches is needed, and even though I don't anticipate printing that large any time soon, I kinda want to... on the other hand the enlarger is currently 8 feet 3 inches tall, and that's already very tall, and possibly too tall to fit in some spaces. ]
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