Re: Glutaraldehyde: a cautionary tale (LONG!)

From: Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>
Subject: Re: Glutaraldehyde: a cautionary tale (LONG!)
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 14:08:05 +0000

> The
> fact that I had to spend quite a lot of time coaxing the liquid out of
> the ampule was the fault of the way the ampule was designed, not my
> fault.

Those ampule is designed to be used with injectors or small pipettes.
Trying to shake the chemical out of it would be very hard.

Also, I think I gave a fair warning to take extra caution because you
were about to buy glut in high concentration, and you said you
understood it.

I use my 2.5% glutaraldehyde stock in darkroom with good ventilation
but air flow rate nowhere near open window can provide, and I dry all
my material in my darkroom, which is about 200 sqf. Only the thing I
care about is to minimize the time I handle the glut before mixing it
in to gelatin sol. I use small disposable medical injector (though I
reuse it many times for this purpose) because I don't have large area
of solution-air contact. Once glut is mixed with gelatin, glut
molecules are quickly and tightly bound to gelatin molecules and I
don't think drying was the culprit. If you had to discard excess
glutaraldehyde solution, the glut could evaporate from the point you
discarded, but I suppose you thought about that.

Someone else's cigarette would affect my health more than my gelatin
hardening practice.

However, if you find no benefit of gelatin sizing or hardening of
gelatin in your paper stock and process, I don't see why you have to
mess with all these steps. In my process, gelatin is an essential part
of the process and hardening is very important because I often use
multiple steps of bleach and toning.

--
Ryuji Suzuki
"All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie." (Bob Dylan 2000)