Continued from this link: http://notesandnods.typepad.com/photography_for_profit_or/2009/10/your-own-darkroom-continued.html
Before i get too far into the requirements for enlarging negatives to make silver halide prints, let me round of a couple of additional ideas to help mechanize your film processing.
If you are going to continue to do small quantities of film and slides, both color and black and white, you can get by using stainless steel takes and reels. This is what I have always preferred. However, in the realm of reasonably affordable options to help you gain a little more facility for controlling temperature, which is desirable for black and white, and essential for color—you would do well to consider a Jobo Film Processor. You can find these for sale on eBay. I paid $200 for one recently, but I have seen them go for a lot less occasionally.
I will place photos of this system here as soon as I get some taken. But in a nutshell, the system consists of a rectangular table-top plastic tub, with a built-in heater. Processing tanks set in the tub, thereby maintaining close control of the temperature. This system will greatly assist you. With it you can do color and black and white negatives, as well as E-6 slides. Please note that not all transparency films can be processed with E-6 chemistry. If you plan to process your own slides/transparencies, you’ll need to buy the correct film.
A Jobo System comes with Instructions. If you are missing those, they can be found and downloaded for free from the Internet. It is from that point a simple, though somewhat tedious project of setting up and following the instructions precisely—until you get it down square. In any event, I recommend that you use a few trial rolls of film for each process the first few times. It is probably best, until you learn the A, B, C’s of this process to buy the chemistry in kit form. Most, if not all, brands of chemical for each respective process, are easily adapted to the Jobo rig. And I must say there are other brands of processors available as well.
This post turned into something longer than I had at first considered. I will continue the enlarging drill within a future post (soon).