[pure-silver] Re: How do you wash fiber paper?


----- Original Message ----- From: "jeffrey" <puresilver@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2005 7:28 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: How do you wash fiber paper?


One thing I like to do to conserve water is to cascade my wash water backwards.

(RC) Prints go from the fixer tray to a tray of water, that is fed by the outflow of the next water tray, which is fed by an old Kodak siphon. I figure that the minute or so that a print spends in the first wash probably gets 75%+ of the fixer off the print, and the 'Kodak wash' gets the rest. Prints never go directly from the fixer to the Kodak wash.

I built my own 'archival' washer some years back. (bit of a failure, truth be told) I used commonly available parts - no plexi, just a Rubbermaid tub as the basis. Anyway, one idea I was proud of was that I fitted it in two places with bulkhead fittings, to which hoses were attached, which cascaded the water backwards to a preliminary wash tray, and to the stop bath tray, which, of course, had no stop bath in it. The hoses had quick-releases fitted for stowing the thing away after use.

At least, it seemed pretty clever back then.....


Cascading works well for conserving water. Since the wash rate depends on the ratio of hypo in the emulsion to the hypo dissolved in the water the relatively small amount of hypo in the final wash water will not slow the process down significantly when used to wash hypo laden prints. There are commercial processing machines built like this. The drawback is the extra complication for a small volume washer.

---
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 

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