U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: drying racks?

Re: drying racks?



I place in cardboard boxes such as those used for storage of documents. Being somewhat light tight, it enables me to do other things in the darkroom area while they are drying.
On Aug 11, 2009, at 11:29 AM, phritz phantom wrote:

hi everyone,
i'm currently doing some re-organizing in my alt. processes working area. unfortunately i don't have a real lab, only a room for the dry side and classic b/w positive stuff and a bathroom for all the wet work. after about a year, i'm somewhat fed up with some of the chaos and constant fear of things possibly contaminated with dichromate or something else... actually i'm very careful (i think/ hope), but at times the overlapping of space for living and for photography makes me nervous....
so, i'm in the process of building drying racks for, well... drying, but especially for drying coated emulsions and sensitized tissue. the classic workflow would be to coat, leave flat for some time, then hang to dry- i guess. that's what i've been doing until now. but i don't want to do the hanging anymore, because the only place to hang them is above my bathtub and i don't feel comfortable with that anymore. also horizontal drying is beneficial sometimes.

so i've built some drying frames out of fly screens and canvas frames. i will stack those, put some kind of pan beneath it to collect possible drops and a fan in front of it. now i started thinking, that cleaning those frames could be a nuisance, so i will protect them with a layer of old newspaper (anything sticky on the backside should just wash off during processing) or so ... or switch to wire screens if i can find them.
what i've been wondering these days is, how everyone else is handling the coated papers? maybe there is an ingenious simple solution (hopefully), i didn't think of..

regards,
phritz






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