Category: How-to

Categories
How-to Trial and Error

Homemade-Stencil Advances, Paper Suggestion, and Spirit Duplicator Fluid Alternative

Stencils suitable for making at home

The creator of the YouTube channel @oldtypewritersandcalculators recently posted a video about making home-scale stencils that can be used with a stylus and file plate, much in the manner of the Japanese file-plate method (see Tomoko Kanzaki’s work, using this method, here and here). These stencils can presumably also be used on a Gestetner or AB Dick-type mimeograph if they have an appropriate header attached in order to secure the stencil to the drum.

Ingredients: paraffin wax, carnauba wax, and “vaseline oil,” which, in the US, is known as mineral oil. Additionally, you need thin, transparent, sturdy paper. Here it looks a bit like tissue or tracing paper, and the stated weight is 20gr/m2. You might have good luck with washi/Yoshino paper, though (see next stencil experiment, below)

Supplies: Heat source, scale, metal tray, paintbrush, and a metal can.

Method: Weigh out 3 parts paraffin, 3 parts mineral oil or “vaseline oil”, and 1 part carnauba wax, into the can. Melt over low heat. Heat the metal tray also on low to facilitate the waxing of the paper without the wax hardening too fast. Use the paintbrush to spread a thin layer of the melted mixture onto the paper (or conversely, onto the tray itself, setting the paper into the wax), and set aside each sheet to harden.

Stencils suitable for making in your garage or secret lab

Recently Mimeomania (facebook group) member Sam Davisson was able to tinker around with a recipe for stencil coating available from a 1979 patent.

Patent 1979 Pressure sensitive stencils US4180621Download

Sam’s process, comments, and photos follow:

“Homemade Impact Stencils!!!

After some trial and error, I happened upon a coating recipe that worked amazing. This is from a 1979 Gestetner patent, US 4,180,621. This is the recipe found in Example 1, Main Coating.

This is based on nitrocellulose plastic, which has several plasticizers and lubricants mixed with it, along with solvents, allowing everything to be dissolved together, have paper dipped in it, and hug to dry.
******************

Recipe, as in the patent:
(Parts by weight)

Nitrocellulose – 10
Coconut oil – 4.2
Diethylene Glycol – 2.8
Butyl Stearate – 16.2
Oleic Acid – 81.7
Microlith Blue 4GA (a blue dye) – 3.8 — Didn’t include in mine
Nonoxol DCP (antioxidant and bactericide) — Didn’t include in mine
Ethyl Acetate – 46
Methylated Spirit (denatured alcohol) – 139
******************

I’ll be working with this recipe to see what else can be substituted and left out, to make it easier to recreate for others. Below is my best guesses as to what each ingredient does, in 3 essential categories (base, plasticizer/lubricant/distender/elasticizer, and solvent):

Nitrocellulose – base plastic – this is what photographic film used to be made from
Coconut oil – plasticizer
dithylene glycol – plasticizer
butyl stearate – plasticizer
Oleic acid – plasticizer
Microlith Blue – blue dye, used for legibility when stencilizing
Nonoxol DCP – preservative for oils so they won’t oxidize, also a bactericide
Ethly Acetate – allows nitrocellulose and oils to be soluble in alcohol
Methylated spirit – primary solvent, AKA denatured alcohol
******************
!!WARNING!!

If you plan to recreate this, know that there are a lot of volatile chemicals involved – my house still stinks from mixing this this morning. ALSO, nitrocellulose is EXTREMELY flammable – that’s why they stopped making film with it. It is shipped wet. It must be dried before mixing into solution.”

The collected ingredients:

Prior to mixing:

Jar of coating solution on left. Coating pan on bottom. Yoshino paper on cardboard drip tray, top.

Stencil hung to dry:

The stencil after being typed and written upon. See * below for details about the dark tone on the background and for more info on how to achieve quality imprints on stencils.

And the results!

Kevin asked, “Sam, there seems to be a light gray cast to the background on these prints. Do you know what is causing that? Is ink seeping through the stencil?”

Sam said, “Its not the ink, I needed a backing sheet that contrasted, so I spray painted a sheet of paper black but didn’t let it dry enough, so it rubbed off on the stencil (as seen in the picture holding it to the light) and transferred to the paper when printing. If you use black construction paper or something as a backing, this shouldn’t happen. I also need to add a colorant to the coating (titanium white, when used with a black backing) for contrast of stenciled letters.”

Kevin commented, “I see. It is good to know that the ink was not seeping through. From the factory, the stencils came with a sheet of carbon paper between the stencil paper and the backer sheet. It is a waxy carbon paper, not solvent carbon, and it offsets onto the stencil a bit when you type, so that you can clearly read what you have typed. It was referred to as a ‚cushion sheet’ by some manufacturers, because the softer, waxy surface of the carbon paper allows the type to cut a bit deeper into the stencil. Putting an ordinary sheet of wax carbon paper that you buy at Staples, carbon side up, behind the stencil paper should achieve the same effect. On blue stencils, this waxy carbon sheet is white, in order to create a good contrast.”

The paper used for the stencil is the classic Yoshino, available here. The nitrocellulose is from here.

Mimeograph Paper Option

Kevin, who is very actively using mimeograph and spirit duplicator machines, is always on the lookout for supplies available today that can replace the no-longer-produced versions of the past. He recently found that the Crayola brand lightweight construction paper that’s available in Canada makes a nice replacement for AB Dick Mimeotone paper. That brand, if it’s available wherever you, dear reader, happen to be, you might see if it’s similar in quality.

He says, “It has the same weight and texture and absorbs mimeo ink very well.  I think it is groundwood paper, which is what Mimeotone was.  I found that the grain on the construction paper is short, and normal paper (mimeo or any other copy paper) has a long grain, but it doesn’t seem to make a huge difference.  It feeds on the machines fine as long as you don‘t run it too fast (and Riso ink needs to be run slow anyway), and it folds without breaking at the folds when run through the paper folder.  (AB Dick Mimeotone cracks on the folds when folded).”

Alternative Spirit-Duplicator Fluid

Kevin also reports on his experiments with developing a less noxious fluid for use in spirit duplicators.

“Making a non-toxic spirit fluid is very simple.  Mix 85-90% propylene glycol and 10-15% distilled water (by volume).  But do note that with machines that do not use a pump to distribute fluid, it requires a more absorbent wick.  Such a wick can be made using soft, pure wool shoe felt, about 1/4“ thick.  It needs to be a material that absorbs very quickly.  An absorbent upholstery foam may work as well.

“There is a tendency for some papers to curl with this fluid, but I found if you run the paper with the top side as it comes from the package up, then the curl occurs toward the bottom and is not much of an issue for most things I duplicate.”

Categories
History How-to

The Pre-Hectographs, part 1: The State of Copying up to the Early Industrial Revolution

No, the pre-hectographs were not members of an art and cultural movement the way the pre-Raphaelites were. To our eyes they look simply like interim technologies, even like failures cast aside in the long winnowing process of time. But were they, ultimately? Will someone in the future decide to loop back around and pick one of these methods up, the way many of us in the digital age have looked back to mimeographs and hectographs and their offshoots, the spirit duplicators? Will they turn out, in the end, to be the vehicles of some future art and cultural movement? Only time will tell.

Who’s to say what constitutes a failed (or obsolete) technology when none of us know the full course of human endeavors far into the future?

Certainly some of the methods I came across as I searched through records for information on pre-hectograph (or contemporaneous) copying techniques look like failures. They fell out of use – or were never picked up at all – though their inventors pinned high hopes to them. But I don’t think they necessarily failed at anything more than an inability to stand out and get “picked up” in a time of intense technological innovation.

Ok, one or more of them probably failed because they were far too complex to either make or use; here I point to the “pantograph” as patented by Henry Neumeyer in 1856, which, unlike its namesake, the pantograph invented by Heron of Alexandria in the first century AD (replica pictured here) complexified something relatively simple…

Wikimedia Commons

The pantograph was modified in 1631 by Christoph Scheiner, a German astronomer.

Wikimedia Commons

It was reconfigured by Claude Langlois in 1744, with this iteration refining the ultimate in simple tools designed to complete a complex job (of making a copy of an original drawing perfectly to scale), seen here,

Wikimedia Commons

Compare those, then, to Neumeyer’s pantograph that looked like this:

screenshot from patent

and this

screenshot from patent

I can’t make heads or tails of it, honestly, other than to note that a writing implement is connected through gears to… other things.

I don’t think it was widely manufactured and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was because of its extreme complexity.

Basically, for as much of pre-industrial human history as we know about, copying texts was a human-scale skill in that it required the direct copying effort (as in, a re-creation of the original) on the part of either the originator or a person trained as a scribe, copyist, or a clerk to do the same. Of course students of many subjects and at various levels of mastery copied texts for their own use, or in the case of images, the act of copying existing works of art was itself a training exercise. Actually the same is true of texts – writing out passages by hand has long been recognized as a useful way to train the mind as well as the eye and the hand – but when the desired result is a copy for a copy’s sake, it’s rather slow going.

Wikimedia Commons

A momentary interlude – into the fine arts

As late as 1799, several methods were available to artists who wished to copy prints and engravings or perhaps their own work for reuse. That year’s edition of The Laboratory; or School of the Arts -containing a large collection of valuable secrets, experiments, and manual operations in arts and manufactures gives details (p.36).*

It is the second method of the volume that might be of interest to stencil-duplicating experimenters, as it hews very close to that method though it veers off at the end. Essentially, the same process is followed to achieve a tracing, then, the tracing is punctured along the drawn lines with a sharp needle attached to a stick (to avoid poking your finger) so that a clean sheet of paper below it is also lightly punctured. That sheet is then rubbed with “finely powdered charcoal, with a little stump, or roller, made up of a narrow slip of cloth, or flannel” – this provides an outline that can then be drawn over with ink. Where this might be useful from a stencil standpoint is if the punctured tracing can serve the stencil’s function, allowing the charcoal to fall through to the page below – of course the page below need not be punctured in that case.

The remaining three methods involve two types of what amounts to homemade carbon paper (one prepared with “vermilion or black lead dust, mixt with a little fresh butter” and the other with lampblack mixed also with butter). The third calls for “lanthern horn” – sheets of thinly sliced cow horn traditionally used as panes in lanterns (actually available here) – upon which a design could be traced or drawn in India ink to then be breathed upon several times and, thus moistened, transferred in reverse to a moistened sheet of paper.

It seems unlikely that any of us will have vermilion, black lead dust, or thinly-sliced cow horn on hand, though lampblack (soot) might make an appearance; so these recipes are probably of limited value and are presented here mostly to appease historical curiosity. (Actually, maybe my curiosity isn’t totally appeased. I am considering a later post on the various types of carbon paper I’ve come across…)

The ages-old method of hand-copying text changed as the Industrial Revolution (1760 to about 1840) prompted most of its sufferers into a frenzy of productivity that stimulated mechanical and chemical experimentation. This resulted in James Watt’s copy press and eventually the hectograph.

But first, to trace the earlier signs of some of that experimentation, we turn to W. B. Proudfoot’s The Origin of Stencil Duplicating, where we learn that John Evelyn’s diary mentions an ink developed by 1655 that would “give a dozen copies when moist sheets of paper were pressed to it” (pp.18-19). No other details are given; there’s no mention of the use of a press or the type of paper utilized, and unfortunately, the ink recipe is not included.

Later, other copying inks would be developed, including this simple version described in 1881, employing the use of glycerin – a product discovered only in 1779 and thus not available to our 1655 ink-maker.

We might be able to infer that, minus James Watt’s 1780 invention of the copy press and the 1881 author’s use of glycerin-infused ink, the overall method employed by the 1655 copyist was similar to later developments in its use of slow-drying ink, dampened papers, and manual pressure, perhaps applied by hand; however, it was Watt’s invention (and his specialized ink) that changed the nature of copying tremendously.

We’ll pick up with Watt in the next post and explore the method of copying he invented and that was put into use around the world, with an eye toward recovering that and other pre-hectographic duplicating methods.

screenshot from hygra.com – public domain image depicting James Watt’s copying press.

—–

*Hat-tip to Joyce Godsey, proprietor of Time Traveller’s Rabbit Hole, who shared this gem See also her facebook group, here. Earlier versions of this book (1750 and 1770) do not include the copying methods.

—
References

Online sources cited above.

For a timeline-derived overview with images, please see The Early Office Museum’s Antique Copy Machines page.

Printed text:

Proudfoot, W. B. 1972. The Origin of Stencil Duplicating. Hutchinson and Co., Ltd.: London.

Categories
How-to Trial and Error

Functional Fax, Finally

-plus tips to ensure that you get a good machine-

With a new Brother Intellifax 775, I am now in thermal-stencil-making business. I prepped my Riso master sheet, inserted it into the paper feed tray, put my original into the scanner feed tray, hit copy, and voila, a thermal stencil with good resolution and no marring of the thermal paper.

It was pointed out to me that I could easily apply tape over the cartridge sensor lever to trick the machine into thinking a cartridge was in place (see photo below). Thermal paper could then be taped to a sheet of paper and, when run through the paper feed mechanism, the thermal printer would print directly on the thermal paper. That trick prevents the massive hassle of winding thermal paper onto cartridge rolls.

Should you wish to use a thermal fax machine to print stencils, I recommend the following:

  • Get the newest machine you can.
  • If you get one that is “new in box” make sure it’s NOT a model that has been sitting in its box since the 1980s. Or even the 1990s… and maybe not even since the early 2000s. Really, get the newest machine you can. Unfortunately you’ll likely be guessing when any particular fax machine was made – I have had no luck figuring out the manufacture dates of particular models; that information doesn’t seem to be publicly available. Still, you can kind of tell by brands’ model numbers that, in many cases, increase in relation to later release dates.
  • If the fax machine is used, ask the seller to test the copy function and send you proof that the output is clean. Ideally see a photo of both the original and the copy. If the seller says they can’t do that because they don’t have a cartridge installed, think long and hard about the purchase.
  • Purchase only from sellers who accept returns.
  • Test the fax machine immediately upon receipt – I waited too long with my first one because I was busy with other things and missed the chance to get a refund for its being non-functional.

Had I done those things, I could’ve saved myself some trouble. Oh well, at least I gained the experience with which I can help you make a better fax-purchase decision.

Here is what you want to look for:

  • A plain-paper thermal fax machine* – this prints on regular (letter or A4 depending on your location) copy paper with a thermal-printer mechanism.

Avoid laser, laserjet, and inkjet fax machines. They do not have the thermal printer unit that Riso master paper requires.

Alternatively, you can try one of these:

  • An Older-style thermal fax machine that prints on rolls of thermal “fax paper.” If you try this, make sure that the rolls are the same width as the Riso master rolls you wish to use. In some cases you can just swap out the thermal paper with the Riso master roll.

*Today I spent some time looking for the latest in thermal fax machines. I hate to break it to you, but there isn’t one. Most (all?) thermal fax machines have been discontinued. I checked the following manufacturers: Brother, HP, and Sharp. Likewise, neither Amazon, Walmart, Staples, OfficeDepot, nor Best Buy are carrying new thermal fax machines. Ah, the poignant sound of another obsolete technology slipping out of reach.

Your best bet is your local used-goods market/garage sale circuit, or online via ebay or facebook marketplace.

If you don’t need to make stencils from originals that are already on paper and are willing to produce directly from your computer, you can try a “pocket printer” that uses thermal printing technology. A Mimeomania member reports good results with a Paperang A4 printer (300dpi) and a quick search shows several such things for sale on various sites. Looks like A4 size is cheaper than letter size – but, since Riso paper is most easily found in A4 size, Americans don’t have to aim for letter-sized since stencil size can be flexible.

If you’d rather have a plain-paper fax machine, I can attest that the Brother Intellifax 775 works for this purpose. In addition, I’ve seen videos with the Intellifax 575 making thermal tattoo stencils, and of course Stampalofi uses a Philips (model unknown).

Categories
How-to

The Tin-Can Wonder – a low-tech, DIY mimeograph machine

Thanks to a lucky find — a stash of 1940s and 50s fanzines hidden in a trunk for safekeeping in a Riverside attic — donated to the University of Iowa library, instructions for making mimeography’s most stripped-down variation are now available. Rich Dana (UI graduate), prompted by Pete Balestrieri’s (Curator of Science Fiction and Popular Culture Collections at UI) discovery and mention of the information he found in a supplement to Science Fiction World, scanned the instructions for making a DIY mimeograph machine and they’re now available to all.

Here, Rich and Pete talk about the history of the main collection that yielded this gem, the fanzine-world in general, and the Tin-Can Wonder specifically. Rich also heads to his secret workshop to make and use the simple “machine” to print a version of the original instructions (digital copy of the original available below the video). Please download and distribute freely.

Tin-Can-WonderDownload

Yes, the elusive stencil is still required. In later posts I’ll continue discussing the options available to mimeographers (including making your own).

Mimeograph Revival