Cooool! Thanks Jonathan. This is the next thing I'll have to tackle on my road
to Daguerreotypist-ship. I'm working on building a mercury development box,
and have been worrying about the best way to polish my plates. What kind of
electrical polisher do you use?
BTW- I hope you don't mind-I grabbed your Spring Island jpg to use as my desktop
background. Tiled, it makes my desktop look like a lush southern rain forest.
Brad
Jonathan Danforth wrote:
> It has always been suggested to me that I hand-polish my plates after electric
buffing on a red-rouge polishing pad. I tried an experiment yesterday that
yielded great results! Here's my new polishing method:
> 1. Heat plate with blowtorch for ~ 30s
> 2. Buff on stitched muslin wheel with red jeweler's rouge (Dialux)
> 3. Buff on unstitched muslin wheel with blue jeweler's rouge
> 4. Clean edges
> 5. Buff by hand on velvet buffing board using powdered black Iron Oxide.
>
> I read about black iron oxide from the amateur astronomers that polish their
own mirrors for telescopes. They do the process wet using a slurry of black
iron oxide but it works very well dry also! These were my best polished plates
ever and they were so much faster than my old plates that I severely
overexposed both plates yesterday! Wheee!
>
> -Jonathan
>
Received on 08/20/06-01:38:11 PM Z
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