Re: Pre-shrink paper for gum (oa to Katharine)

Cor Breukel wrote:

"The recent exchanges about gelatine sizeing and hardening made me
wonder: as
I understood and employed sizing: when one does multiple gum prints, one
has
to pre-shrink your paper (soak it in hot water and dry it. This
pre-shrinking results in loosing the size (gelatine or something else,
not
always known). So one has to size and harden again.

Katherine: if I uderstand correctly from your webside you do not
pre-shrink?
And you re-register by "selectively" dry your paper until your register
marks match. Do both dimensions shrink equally?

In my own limited experience I first faithfully shrank and resized, but
later I only shrunk and did not size, and I had no problems with
multiple
layers of gumcoats..

So maybe I should also abandon pre-shrinking..

I found re-registering the biggest hurdle in multiple printing,
subsequent
layers never completly matched.".

Hi Cor,
Well, I suppose it fits with my calling as an iconoclast that I've never
preshrunk my paper, ever.

And yes, I know everyone says that papers shrink differentially, so that
they don't shrink as much in one direction as in the other. I believe
this to be true intellectually, but in practice I have never found it to
be an issue. I have no trouble at all registering exactly for multiple
printing.

But there's one big caveat you should be aware of, (and I should
probably say this on my website as well) and that's that I live in a
very humid climate and that there are degrees of driness that my papers
simply never get to experience. (I'm still astonished when I think of
Keith's and Christina's references to paper so dry that it "snaps" or
"crackles." My paper NEVER makes such crisp noises; all it can ever
manage is a kind of limp "thwump.") So it may be that the range of
driness that my paper can achieve simply doesn't rise to the threshold
level where this differential shrinking would be an issue.

So, as with everything in gum, don't listen to what I say, listen to
what the paper tells you. What it tells you will be right for your
particular situation.
Katharine
Received on Wed Mar 31 15:10:25 2004