Hi all,

I am a HABS + HAER photographer and recently finished a few large jobs that require more than the normal quantity of contact prints from 4x5 and 5x7 negatives. I'm willing to hire a welder, break out the radial-arm-saw, and contact the glass company in town to cobble together a contact-printing-frame-easel that will let me do many contacts in a row with as little monkeying around as possible. a sort of assembly line approach.

I've already jimmy'd a oscillating fan to agitate my trays so I can continue printing while the prints agitate... so this shouldn't be too hard, I already have some ideas. I'm sure most of you don't do contact printing in large numbers, but I 'm sure some of you have already noodled this over and have built a better mousetrap, so why should I reinvent the wheel?

Here's the setup:

5x7 film needs to be contacted onto 5x7 double weight fiber paper under an enlarger.
(I occasionally do minor burn/dodge by waving my hand in the light path.)
I'd like to align the paper and neg perfectly square without touching the glass above the neg or the negative itself or using two hands. I was thinking of getting a 10x12 piece of thick glass (1/4 inch) that would give me the weight I need, and 5x12 inch side of the glass I can grab onto that's outside the 5x7 area over the neg & paper.

Here's the why:

Imagine printing 200 contacts from 20 negatives. I don't want to use paper larger than the film because that wastes paper/money, but also HABS guidelines require 4x5 and 5x7 contact prints the exact same size as the film, showing the whole clear rebate edges of the film. (If I were to lay the 5x7 neg on a piece of 8x10 paper like I often do on smaller jobs, I wouldn't need to worry about alignment, I'd just trim off the 4 black borders later, but here that requires 4 cuts x200 sheets.)
The glossy FB paper has a slight curl, so there has to be heavy glass or a weighted frame (or pressure via a clip, etc. but a clip takes two hands x200 that will slow down the process)

Any thoughts regarding this invention would be appreciated! I've been lurking this list for years, it's great, finally signed up, thanks in advance for the help.

-Schaf