Re: PVA for gum printing

Hi, long time no hear!

I'm creating hardened gum (not PVA) right now for the first phase of the
analysis; hopefully the result of that first analysis will be available
in a couple of weeks. I'm pretty excited about it.

Do you or anyone know of any reason why mylar shouldn't be used for a
substrate for hardening the gum? The chemist I'm working with is going
to analyze the mylar somehow to make sure there's nothing that the gum
could pick up from it in the brief time it sits on the mylar sheet that
could contaminate the sheet, but I'm still a little nervous about it. He
wanted glass, but I couldn't get the gum to stick on the glass (I'm just
finishing a post about that that I'll send in a minute) so I've settled
on mylar as a reluctant second. The nice thing about mylar is that it is
easier to deal with a lot of mylar sheets with gum on them than it would
be to deal with a lot of pieces of glass with gum on them.
Katharine Thayer

Robert Schaller wrote:
>
> Dear Katherine,
>
> What ever happened to this physical chemistry research? Any updates?
>
> Robert Schaller
>
> On 6/17/04 6:19 AM, "Katharine Thayer" <kthayer@pacifier.com> wrote:
>
> > I've got a physical chemist interested in working out the chemistry of
> > dichromated gum, but because gum is so complicated and variable and the
> > structure isn't completely worked out, and the structure of PVA is
> > simple, he wants to start with PVA and see if he can understand what
> > happens there first, before considering gum.
> >
> > I told him that I had printed with gloy, which I believe to be mostly
> > PVA, and it seemed to work very similarly to gum. But we need to use a
> > pure PVA of course for these experiments, so I need to find a grade and
> > molecular weight of PVA that would be similar to that used in gloy. I
> > don't know where one would find that out about the PVA in gloy, can
> > anyone give me a clue? Or suggest a grade and molecular weight that
> > might be close?
> >
> > I googled "gloy" and found some places to buy gloy in UK, but not a
> > manufacturer. But (gloy printers should appreciate this) I did find a
> > composer who composed "Ode to Gloy" a parody of Beethoven's 9th, "in
> > honor of the glue."
> > Katharine
Received on Sun Sep 5 08:24:07 2004