The Bessler 45 series is the most kluge-friendly enlarger ever made. It is easy to wall-mount, will accept 8x10 heads without interference from the column, and once aligned it stays that way.
The first thing that I did when setting up this darkroom was to cut out a section of a floor joist just above the enlarger, and my back has said " thank you" ever since. The more the height of an enlarger is limited, the lower the table will have to go when big enlargements are made. So, unless you have a very long rail, raising the whole enlarger is one solution. This one uses stuff available from any hardware store.
Starting with the mount, you can see from fig, 4 how it slides up and down. Eye bolts are fixed in four places to engage two slides made from electrical conduit. With the aid of a counter-weight, shown on the left, and a pulley mounted to the ceiling, the entire enlarger is raised and lowered with ease. Pins, shown in fig. 5 hold it in the top position while it is allowed to bottom-out on the table in the lower position.
Formats from 35mm to 8x10 are accommodated without re-configuration and without much loss of light intensity in the smaller formats. It does this by placing 4x5 and smaller sizes farther away from the light source. Again, the kluge-friendly Bessler makes this an easy matter.
As shown in Fig.6, there is an extra set of bellows above the original 4x5 bellows. This is simply an old discarded Wehman 8x10 field camera bellows cut down a bit and fitted to the Aristo light source.
A stretch film holder is used for 8x10 negs as shown in fig 7 and a slot for P.C. filters was cut in the Aristo head to accept filters cut from Roscoe Gels – Fig 9.
The Bessler is strong enough to support an un-modified Aristo head. But, since I was on a roll, I took out the heavy power supply, stored it externally, cabled it to the head on the enlarger and was able to cut 3" off the top of the box. Besides lighter weight, an added advantage is the ability to raise it 3"higher in my ceiling-challenged darkroom. Fig.8 shows the aluminum bar that mounts the head to the enlarger. The nuts at the top adjust the front-to-back alignment and the smaller one in the middle goes into a horizontal slot which enables side-to-side alignment.
Big enlarger lenses are a problem with the Bessler. To allow the lens board to slide into place, an adapter is needed, like the one for a 240mm Rodagon, shown in Fig.10. This one was "hogged out" of aluminum bar-stock on a small lathe.
Filters used:
For low contrast, Roscoe 4530 and 4590 green.
For high contrast, 4730 and 4790 magenta.
These can be cut to size and used in many combinations.
