Re: Boiling gelatin

From: Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>
Subject: Re: Boiling gelatin
Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 07:41:50 +0000

> As I said, I don't think it has anything
> to do with gelatin, much less with boiling gelatin; that was a red
> herring that was raised to a huge issue by non gum printers who rudely
> barged into a discussion of this topic.

That's a really lame excuse. See below. It is too soon to quibble
around only after a month of posting pages of your opinion. Now all of
sudden your mistake (if you admit so, though I doubt it) is someone
else's red herring. What a nonesense. Where is your science?

After all, if what you said last month was really based on reliable
and repeatable data you collected with confidence, you would not get
frightened by one person coming up with merely one more piece of data,
just because it is completely contradictory to your experience. If
your previous post was really based on facts and hard evidences, you
would not forget your belief so quickly and now make up a new story
that is completely inconsistent with your own old story.

--
Ryuji Suzuki
"Well, believing is all right, just don't let the wrong people know
what it's all about." (Bob Dylan, Need a Woman, 1982)
From: Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>
Subject: Re: Autoclaving gum and gelatin
Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 10:18:07 +0000
> I thought we had settled this the last time around, but I'll review for
> clarity what I thought was decided:  Kate, Judy, I and perhaps others,
> all reported that we have observed that if the gelatin gets "too hot"
> then it doesn't work well as a size for gum. I don't know the cutoff
> temperature between "too hot" and "not too hot" but I just heat the
> gelatin enough to dissolve completely and to stay melted while brushing
> on, which doesn't have to be over 120F, and it works fine.  If it does
> get too hot, it results in a characteristic speckling pattern, as Judy
> said, and as I and others have also observed. My information comes not
> from old literature, which I don't read and didn't know that it said
> anything about this, but from my own experience. 
> 
> In that earlier thread, I said  "I'm not sure it matters what happens
> technically to the gelatin; what is important is that overheating the
> gelatin seems to lead to imperfect sizing, for whatever reason."  I
> still stand by that statement. But I'm not arguing that the gelatin
> loses its ability to gel, or that it otherwise "breaks down," only that
> something happens to its ability to provide an adequate size for gum. I
> won't say what that is, because I don't know, but it doesn't really
> matter what causes it physically or chemically, the fact is that this is
> what happens, at least in my shop.  But what the heck, the guy should
> just autoclave his gelatin and try using it for a sizing for gum, and
> see what happens; the more information the better. 
> 
> As I said, it's been my observation that when the gelatin is overheated,
> the sizing fails and results in speckling. That observation isn't
> altered by all the arguing and bloviating  about gelatin and its
> different states and the ability to make calves foot jelly by boiling
> calves feet. All those things are no doubt true, but still, if you get
> the gelatin too hot, the resulting size will give you speckling in your
> gum print. At least that's what I've observed a couple of times, and I
> found that lowering the temperature of the gelatin took care of the
> problem. In social science research we call this a single-subject ABAB
> research design; it is a good design for a situation like we've got in
> gum printing where the "tests" that are done can only be done one gum
> printer at a time. If you see  a particular result under one condition,
> and you don't see the result without the condition, and if this pattern
> is repeated, where every time you see the result, the condition is
> present, and when you remove the condition the result goes away, it's
> fair to assume that you've learned something.  
> 
> For both Judy and myself, it looks like we've learned that for our own
> case, it was the heat that made the speckling. But whether this only
> applies to glyoxal-hardened and unhardened gelatin, or only in our own
> particular labs, one can't say, and I don't think either of us are
> saying. What I've said is that this is my experience, use it if it's
> useful to you. But to hoot the observations  out of existence simply
> because they are inconsistent with some theory of how gelatin behaves,
> is itself inconsistent with being a scientist. Scientists rely on
> observations; if the observations don't agree with the theory, they
> adjust the theory to reflect the reality of the observations, rather
> than dismissing the observations out of hand. When at least three people
> have observed that hotter gelatin results in sizing failure for gum, and
> that using a lower temperature eliminates the speckling, then it seems
> outrageous to me to be so derisive about those observations.