> After he reeled off a laundry list of how the unit was hurting me
>-- lung problems from inhaling glass and particulate matter, serious risk
>to retinas from looking at UV source, etc -- I got rid of it and built my
>first of many florescent UV boxes. They belong in museums, not darkrooms.
This reminds me that a friend was using unenclosed and very powerful industrial
UV mercury vapour lamps, 1500 watts, arranged so that the work pieces were
vertical and the light horizontal. he spent too much time in this UV light and
developed cancers on the eye lids.
My own lights, two 125 volt HP MV lamps designed to givean even spread of
light up to four feet from the bulb, are attached to the under side of a kitchen
work surface in a cupboard with two sheets of 6 mm plate glass on the floor.
The door is closed during exposures. I use one of these lights with students
but my main light is now a six foot sun bed which has eight tubes. The bed is
now mounted on galvanised steel legs to give a clearance of six inches over a
plate glass sandwich. The distance gives reasonable exposure times and space to
manipulate the glass. In order to satisfy putative objections from safety
officers we are mounting a heavy textile flap at the edges to seal off the light
.
Professional printers using HPR 125s in banks of four or more often use sheets
of minus blue to enclose the UV workspace.
Bill also mentioned that UV light was leaking from his lamp exposure.. Surely
the effects of short exposure to reflected light are minimal .
Terry King