Getting to some serious thinking about photo printing here and one thing that has always fascinated me is borderless prints, with the image right up to the edge. For that, you need a vacuum easel to hold the paper flat (glass will detract from the image, so laying a plate of glass over the paper won’t work as well as you might like).
But they’re not inexpensive and they aren’t all that widely available. But as it happens, ol’ Santa Claus dropped something in the whole present stack that might even my dim bulb glimmer: an air hockey table. I see plans to make vacuum easels with shop-vacs or household vacuum cleaners: can you think of anything less conducive to quiet contemplation than a shop-vac running in a small darkroom? Even in a nearby room, since one usually seals a darkroom for light, not sound?
But an air hockey table uses a pretty small fan, very quiet and though I haven’t tested it, I suspect it offers enough pressure differential to hold a piece of printing paper in place. Consider the table is something like 24″x48″ and I would be looking at 16×20 at most, I think this might work just fine. And yet another use for my drill press, to make all those regular holes.
A shallow box, 20 x 24, with a small box fan in the bottom, and the top peppered with small holes: not to hard to make. We would need a way of admitting some air so the fan doesn’t burn out in case it’s more efficient than I expect, so some kind of pressure-sensitive vent (a flap with a rubber-band?) would probably do it. Ah, here’s some prior art. Doesn’t look like he got very far on it. The Shop-Vac-based ones just seem crazy to me, way overkill.
So this is something to think about — after I make a box for my cyanotype printing rig (a wooden box with a removable lid that has UV/blacklight bulbs attached) and a carrying case for my 4×5 so I can take it and the accessories it requires (filmholders, for now) in as few trips as possible.