Re: daguerreotype plate polishing tip

I don't mind, I'm honored! I'm planning an Hg box too, would you care
to share your methods? I wanted to make sure that Hg wasn't reactive
to, say, sheet steel which I had planned to use for the chamber.

I use a big 'ol buffing machine made by JET. The armspan is about a meter!

-Jonathan

BRADLEY ALAN LEWIS wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
http://photographs.danforthsource.com