I haven't built trays, but i've had two darkrooms with sinks i built out of plywood & had lined with "Duradek".... (waterproof vinyl deck covering). A couple of days of good ventilation & the smell from the contact adhesive was gone
I haven't built trays, but i've had two darkrooms with sinks i built out of plywood & had lined with "Duradek".... (waterproof vinyl deck covering). A couple of days of good ventilation & the smell from the contact adhesive was gone
Any boating/marine/sailing shop will have a variety of waterproof paints. The epoxy paints are not just waterproof, they are chemical resistant.
Greg - vinyl deck coatings are pretty short-lived in terms of expansion-contraction survivability, are apt to have some texture, making them hard to clean, stain like heck, and can't tolerate any kind of hot solvent like acetone. Can't recommend them. But someone with industrial roofing skills could heat-weld a true hypalon rubber liner inside a sink. Liquid hypalon is so nasty to breathe that it got banned in the US long ago; I used to sell that for lining industrial plating vats. Penetrating marine or structural epoxies are really the best simple solution on plywood, as long as one is careful health-wise during the application and drying phase. But unlike paints, they cure rather quickly.
If I were still young and ambitious, it might be fun to create a custom laminate waterproof ply using a big vacuum press. I sold a number of really nice German vac presses to cabinet shops just before I retired (no relation to photo drymount presses); not a toy I personally need - too expensive. But all kinds of possibilities with those, even in-house stainless laminates that can be sized down on a panel saw with the right blade, which would of course would itself cost more than a whole set of big prefab plastic darkroom trays - but what the heck. If one has the itch to make things themselves, why not?
Making a sink out of cardboard sounds like an amazing way to save time and money building a darkroom sink. Especially if you don't need it to be permanent. I know the "proper" solution to these things is expensive Marine Epoxy but who wants to deal with the price and smell of that stuff.
Will Wilson
www.willwilson.com
I built a sink in the in my former house, I used 1x8 pine and exterior plywood covered it with marine epoxy, 3 coats if I remember, I had it fully plumbed. It was still good when I moved out of that house 20 years later. I had to saw it in half to get it out of the room.
Bookmarks