I'm still lining up my ducks before I make my first collodion pour, but now that I have gathered all the essential chemicals (the subject of another post), I was anxious to do something with them. Varnish seemed a good place to start even if it's the last step in making a plate.
I used Tai's recipe,
I got the Bioflame tip from a fellow Canadian and excellent wet plate photographer Jim Kost (thanks again Jim!). As Tai says on his site, fully dissolve the Gum Sandarac in the alcohol first, then filter, then add the Lavender oil. Others have recommended mixing all three ingredients first, dissolve (wait a few weeks??) then filter the mixture three or more times. I didn't see the need to filter the oil -- at least not the first time through. I figured the oil might slow the dissolving of the Sandarac or increase the duration of the filtering. Indeed Tai was right, the Sandarac completely dissolved in the denatured alcohol in just a mere couple of hours and some vigorous shaking (unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the murky straw coloured liquid).
Using Quinn Jacobson's idea, I shoved a cotton ball into the base of my dollar store funnel and filtered the Sandarac/alcohol mixture. It took 20 minutes or so. This is the junk in 25g of Sandarac.
And this is the cotton plug:
Notice how there seems to be very little sediment and debris past the first 1/4 of the plug. To my pleasant surprise, the Sandarac/Alcohol mix is quite clean after just one filtering!
I filtered it one more time, just in case, this time through a coffee filter.
Clean as a whistle. The stuff went straight into my pour bottle (I plan to have a drain bottle too).
After this I added the Lavender oil (nice pine smell) and swirled it in the bottle. I did notice a few, barely visible specs in the liquid and a strand of cotton fibre -- Ugh! I plan to filter this mixture one more time before I use it.
At some point, I'll try some lab-grade filters. Alex Timmermans uses Whatman 595 ½ filters, which have a pore size of 5-7μm. Compare this to paper coffee filters have a pore size of about 20μm.
I also learned that washing the temporary mixing bottle, a well cleaned pickle jar, with tap water is a bad idea. It caused the Sandarac/alcohol residue to precipitate and leave a rather yucky scum on the bottle's wall. Same thing happened when I attempted to rinse out my plastic graduated cylinder but this time with 99% isopropyl alcohol. The graduated cylinder was used to measure the Lavender oil. I'm not sure how I'll clean the white residue out. :(
I won't know for certain how well this Canadian Tire concoction will perform until I varnish a plate. From what I've read, one can never know the all additives in denatured alcohol as they vary with manufacturer. Jim tells me he's successfully using the Bioflame stuff for the collodion, developer and varnish. We'll see soon enough.
I used Tai's recipe,
- 50g Gum Sandarac
- 38ml Lavander Oil
- 360ml Grain Alcohol, 95%
I got the Bioflame tip from a fellow Canadian and excellent wet plate photographer Jim Kost (thanks again Jim!). As Tai says on his site, fully dissolve the Gum Sandarac in the alcohol first, then filter, then add the Lavender oil. Others have recommended mixing all three ingredients first, dissolve (wait a few weeks??) then filter the mixture three or more times. I didn't see the need to filter the oil -- at least not the first time through. I figured the oil might slow the dissolving of the Sandarac or increase the duration of the filtering. Indeed Tai was right, the Sandarac completely dissolved in the denatured alcohol in just a mere couple of hours and some vigorous shaking (unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the murky straw coloured liquid).
Using Quinn Jacobson's idea, I shoved a cotton ball into the base of my dollar store funnel and filtered the Sandarac/alcohol mixture. It took 20 minutes or so. This is the junk in 25g of Sandarac.
And this is the cotton plug:
Notice how there seems to be very little sediment and debris past the first 1/4 of the plug. To my pleasant surprise, the Sandarac/Alcohol mix is quite clean after just one filtering!
I filtered it one more time, just in case, this time through a coffee filter.
Clean as a whistle. The stuff went straight into my pour bottle (I plan to have a drain bottle too).
After this I added the Lavender oil (nice pine smell) and swirled it in the bottle. I did notice a few, barely visible specs in the liquid and a strand of cotton fibre -- Ugh! I plan to filter this mixture one more time before I use it.
At some point, I'll try some lab-grade filters. Alex Timmermans uses Whatman 595 ½ filters, which have a pore size of 5-7μm. Compare this to paper coffee filters have a pore size of about 20μm.
I also learned that washing the temporary mixing bottle, a well cleaned pickle jar, with tap water is a bad idea. It caused the Sandarac/alcohol residue to precipitate and leave a rather yucky scum on the bottle's wall. Same thing happened when I attempted to rinse out my plastic graduated cylinder but this time with 99% isopropyl alcohol. The graduated cylinder was used to measure the Lavender oil. I'm not sure how I'll clean the white residue out. :(
I won't know for certain how well this Canadian Tire concoction will perform until I varnish a plate. From what I've read, one can never know the all additives in denatured alcohol as they vary with manufacturer. Jim tells me he's successfully using the Bioflame stuff for the collodion, developer and varnish. We'll see soon enough.
