Re: wax vs oil (was: laser vs inkjet)


Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Thu, 15 Jul 1999 07:49:52 +0000


It's interesting that Pete and I had exactly the opposite experience,
which often seems to be the case in alt processes. I started with
vegetable oil and found it to be sticky and it started to smell after a
while, so I switched to mineral oil and found it to be just the ticket
for me, never going sticky or rancid, and neither drying out nor
remaining too oily on the paper, as well as having a pleasing feel to
the hands. I haven't tried sunflower oil specifically, but used a
generic vegetable oil. I would suggest that beginners to oiling who want
to use a vegetable oil stick with Pete's recommendation of sunflower
oil. When I open up a box of my paper negatives oiled several years ago
with the generic vegetable oil, the rancid smell about knocks me over,
I'm not kidding.

I waxed some negatives this spring and found waxing not to be
satisfactory for me. It may be a specific incompatibility of the wax
with the paper I use (Epson Photo Quality Glossy Paper) but I found that
the waxed negatives scratched very easily, marring the final print.
Katharine Thayer

Peter Charles Fredrick wrote:
>
> Yes Katherine Thayer recommends the mineral oil, which we in the uk call liquid
> paraffin I personally used this oil for a number of years but found it to
> be very viscose and therefore slow working it is also slightly sticky
About
> two years ago I looked around for an alternative and did a number of tests
> on other oils, sunflower came out top for speed of application, trans
> parency and cost.However there is one disadvantage if the oiled neg
> is left out in a warm dry environment it tended to dry out over a number of
> weeks ,this was solved by encapsulating the neg in a plastic sleeve used to
> store documents.Recently I asked my School of Temperaprint students to
> bring all there oiled negs into class twelve students obliged with
> paper/negs created over the past two years there was no smell in other
> words the oil had not gone rancid and there was no drying out, or any other
> deterioration to the image
>



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