Copy Stand

Getting tired of going to the copy shop?

Is your old scanner really slow??

Is your document too big??

Do you have a laser printer?

Than this instructable is for you!

Old enlarger stand: from the optical part you can build a Microscope

steel brackets or strips (2-3 mm)

piece of wood

3 discarded halogen spots +transformer

some screws and one camera thread screw (from old tripod or so).

Of course your digital camera.

If you have an inkjet printer, it will still be expensive to do regular copying; with a laser printer not so.

The new part: to connect lights and camera.
(mine sure will not win a beauty contest, but perhaps later I'll finish it nicely)

The size and shape of the lights determine the design.
3 lights will cancel out most shadows

I just took a scrap piece of wood and cut the brackets to size.

The spots required holes of 13 mm; some smaller holes had to be drilled in some brackets as well.

Lights on both sides and in front on the lower side of the wooden block, the bracket for the camera on the upper side in the middle.

This step is almost too simple to put in the instructable: wire the spots to the transformer and plug it in!

Put the camera on the bracket, focus and zoom to the proper size, and snap away!

Pictures save well in .jpg format, for text, .png or .gif is better. For black& white printing: save in grayscale, to save toner or ink: increase the lightness.

After a few trials, some problems occurred:

1: When copying in the evening, the picture is very yellowish, and some parts are only half illuminated

2: Some pictures in books and magazines reflect the light, resulting in a very poor copy

3: I am 2m - 6'7" tall. To operate the camera, I had to use a step stool. (the stand was on a table).

In 4 days, I'll go to my sweetheart in Suriname! When I'm back I'll need to make many copies for teaching, so then I will fix the problems. The stand works great in daytime!

I'm thinking of using LEDs or fluorescent lights in addition to the halogen lights. LEDs have a poor color performance in yellow/ red. The halogen lights would compensate this....

Some tips and tricks:

The stand is rather bulky. To save lots of space when storing, fasten a bolt through your desk/ table. This way you can attach the stand when needed, and store it in a relatively small space. The base plate can then be discarded. The design of the halogen spots I used allows then to detach without wires, so my stand can get really small!