[jdanforth]

I have an announcement to make: ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH

Thank you.

I spent the afternoon yesterday trying to polish copper and I decided to eschew the emery wheel and polish with tripoli and white. After I got off of the brown wheel I discovered tons of wormy gouges all over the plate! I *think* that the problem is that the wheel was just too hard, spinning too fast, or there were some errant strands that were whipping up on the plate.

So I’m in a real bind! I need to get these to the platers ASAP. I think that I’m going to start fresh with some nice clean wheels but all I have are two stitched denim wheels. D’ya think that I should scrap the stitched Muslin wheels and charge these denim ones up with brown and white? I might have to start all the way back on emery to get rid of these scratches! ARGH!

edit: and yes I have been raking the wheels. I raked them really heavily but still had problems.

[jdanforth]

Jon Lewis wrote:I don’t think anything is easy with daguerreotypes and I’m sure I’ve only seen the tip of the proverbial iceberg…

Boy you said a mouthful.

Jon Lewis wrote:What sizes are you after? I stopped by a jewelry supply in town and they had fine silver sheets that were 6"x36". Perfect for the 2 1/4" square plates I’m going to play with. It’s also good enough for up to 5×7 but irritatingly short of a full plate.

Most of what I make is 4×5 or 4×6. It is irritating that I can’t do whole plate or 8×10 on fine silver sheet. Mostly I’m after 3.5" diameter circles (top secret project).

[jdanforth]

Well I would use fine silver but I can’t get it in the sizes that I want. Can’t ONE thing about daguerreotypes be easy?!?

[jdanforth]

Amberlith has been discontinued but rubylith works fine. I get generic litho film at the local art supply store. I found that it’s FAR EASIER to just say that you’re making your own litho plates than to try to explain daguerreotypie!

I get 5lb jugs of Hypo and 5g vials of gold chloride from the Formulary.

[jdanforth]

I’ve bought Iodine from Photographer’s Formulary and Fisher.

[jdanforth]

I’ll be in London that week through Sunday. I’ll try to make it on Wednesday.

[jdanforth]

Fascinating, Mike. Thanks for sharing.

How does the cladding process work? Are the materials just squished together under high pressure until they’re merged?

edit: Oooh DIAGRAMS!!

[jdanforth]

Last night I tried an experiment. I’ve owned a little hobbyist CNC router for a few months now and last night I convinced it to make some daguerreotype cases!

I used 1/2" thick birch plywood and routed out a cavity that’s 1/4" deep and 4-1/8 x 5-1/8". Perfect! The only drawback is that it takes about 30 minutes to cut out a complete case but I think that I can speed that up.

I know that casedimage is the board’s preeminent casemaker and I’ve seen (and drooled over) his work first hand. Does anyone else make cases? Share your experience! Do you work with exotic materials? Machines?

[jdanforth]

I noticed that too, casedimage. A little moderation is in order. The images from "Breath Less" are all artificial (right?) and it bugs me that they’re in the group.

[jdanforth]

Well I’m not a "PRO" so maybe that has something to do with it.

[jdanforth]

CasedImage.com wrote:I get much more shooting into a fine day.

Ha! I call those "Daguerreodays".

[jdanforth]

Thanks for the tips, Dr. Dag! I have a LOT more copper to prepare in the coming few days so I’ll try out some of your methods. I’ll use brown on a stitched wheel and try to slow it down somehow.

When polishing, do you cris-cross until the scratches disappear or do you just keep going in one direction?

[jdanforth]

I use Becquerel and though I’d love to try Mercury I’m in no rush.

[jdanforth]

Any chance you could share with us your cladding process?

[jdanforth]

Good advice, Daguerreotypist. I originally used 12-inch wheels to make the surface area per minute shorter and, therefore, do more of a buffing action. I still use this for polishing silver but not copper. I get good results with my method so it seems that there’s more than one way to skin a cat (as we say in the USA.).

[jdanforth]

The fine lines are not particularly noticeable especially when you view the dag properly.

I rake the wheels frequently.

edit: the blue compound is supposedly finer than red. I can only assume that my order of compounds isn’t sufficient to eek out all of the lines properly. Maybe a different wheel for more aggressive cutting is in order on the brown compound.

[jdanforth]

Andy_Stockton wrote:As a beginner I will look forward to any replies that are received to this thread. I also wondered if you would share info about your buffing machine? From pictures on your site it looks like you are using 12" wheels. That must take some fairly serious horsepower. What minimum do you recommend?

I have a Jet JSB-10L buffing machine that turns at 1725 RPM. I’ve mostly stopped using 12" wheels since even the industrial buffer I have doesn’t have enough HP to really keep ’em spinning under load. I switched to 6-8" wheels from Caswell Plating and those things are unstoppable! As far as horsepower, 1HP is sufficient in my opinion.

The reason that I like the Jet is that it has very long arbors. I can stack up two wheels on each side which is very useful for buffing copper. When I’m working on silver plates for daguerreotypes then I use one wheel per side so that I have lots of room to move without bumping into the motor housing.

[jdanforth]

Wait… it’s SUMMER over there? What kind of black magic is THIS? Do your toilets go the other way too?

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