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.

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
Uncategorized

Mimeo Experiments

French printing aficionados have been playing with the techniques found in Rich Dana’s book. Here’s a look at how things turned out.

Categories
Uncategorized

Yes, Cheap Copies!

Imagine for a moment (because this has to be imagined and is in no way connected to real events) that you’re a seventh-grade girl, a bit gangly and with legs up to your armpits, freckle-faced and with flyaway hair, and braces to boot. You’ve stepped out of your habitual fashion comfort zone, which is no fashion at all, and are wearing a jersey-knit red and white mini-skirt/t-shirt combo and white tights (why? because it’s 1983). You’ve ducked into the girls’ room in the middle of lunch period, have finished up, and are about to head back out to wander around a bit aimlessly before the next class because there isn’t exactly a group you hang out with, with whom you feel really comfortable.

You step out of the bathroom, make a sharp right toward the building’s corner, but before you round it, you hear a sudden chortle and look back to find two eighth-grade girls nearly doubled over in laughter.

At this juncture — before you’ve dashed around the corner and out of sight so you can, unseen by mocking schoolmates, run a hand down the back of your outfit to find that you’ve tucked your mini-skirt into your tights — you realize you could’ve really used a friend. That friend would’ve caught your fatal error before you’d made it public and most definitely would not have let news of that error leave private space; just as importantly, she wouldn’t have thought badly of you for not being aware of the mysteries of clothes-that-aren’t-pants.

In short, that friend would’ve had your back.

Rich Dana is that friend to Mimeograph Revival. In fact, he’s that friend to all of us who want to learn old-school-style duplicating methods, play with print and copies and colors, and walk boldly into the world with what’s intended to show, showing, but with even our mistakes (perhaps even of the fashion sort) embraced with flair and energy and courage because they reveal something about our thumping-in-our-throats hearts.

Just a few minutes of browsing around is all it takes the astute Mimeograph Revival-reader to notice the site’s exposed … underbelly (shall we say). As of yet, I simply don’t have the practical experience with mimeographs to offer the full suite of helpful resources that you — as experimenters and tinkerers and down-home/low-tech publishing aficionados and hope-to-be’s — might need.

Yet, when I leaped out the door of my inner world onto the internet with a crazy idea and the gumption to just make it happen, the mimeo-enthusiasts like Rich, along with Sam Keller, Erwin Blok, and many others, met me with a warm welcome and hastened me around the corner where I could sort myself out and not be embarrassed by my own presence.

Cheap Copies!: The Obsolete! Press Guide to DIY Hectography, Mimoegraphy, and Spirit Duplication, self-published in late 2021 by Rich Dana, who has some nifty publishing credits and projects to his name, is a crowd-funded book that, to be honest, is exactly what I’d hoped Mimeograph Revival could grow up to be. I am nothing short of astounded that I lucked out enough to jump into this topic at exactly the moment Rich was about to put this book out, because he’s here to reassure, guide, applaud, and then kick the training wheels off my – and your – wobbly but gonna-be-great first ride toward a vast horizon of possibilities.

Cheap Copies! is THE perfect complement to (if it doesn’t succeed it altogether) the digital philosophizing and electronic archiving that goes on here. It’s a Big Top Tent of printing fun, with a DIY, how-to, and join-the-fun ethos that’s a fine representative of the zine-making and -sharing community at large.

There’s a very particular feeling generated when holding someone’s printed treasure in your hands, something that’s been drawn and written, laid out with care – or even with slapdash devil-may-care haste because the word needs to be gotten out pronto – then copied and stapled or otherwise bound together. It’s the feeling presaging surprises to come, a zine-tingle, if you will. This book delivers it in spades with its marriage of aesthetics and substance: bold line drawings, color reprints of hectograph illustrations, humor, and mix of historical documents (including well-researched biography highlights of duplication’s luminaries), helpful resources, reading list, and do-it-now! tutorials.

If you want to know how to make hectograph gel pads and inks, duplicating fluid for spirit duplicators, DIY mimeograph machines and stencils, as well as what to look for in used machines and basic troubleshooting, this book will get you set to go.

Multiple versions of Cheap Copies! were available for those who donated to the book’s Kickstarter campaign. A completely tech-correct version, made available to those who donated more, included interior pages that were mimeograph- and hectograph-printed, a digitally-printed color section, and a hand-printed cover. The option for mid-scale donations was a digitally-printed version of the same text, also in color, and with the hand-printed cover.

About the production process and the resulting product, Rich’s advice to dive in, embrace your mistakes, and say what you need to say sums it up perfectly:

The project hasn’t been without setbacks, of course. Some design ideas, after being printed, just didn’t work and needed to be re-worked. Geriatric machines have needed some time-consuming TLC.  Conversely, there have been serendipitous moments as well, where experiments have yielded unexpected but beautiful results. In short, thanks to your support, I’ve had the ability to go deeper into these processes than ever before, and the result is, I believe, a book that functions well on several levels… a how-to manual, a history book, a fanzine. It’s my epic love poem to the analog underground.

You can order your own copy, here.

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.

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

Categories
Uncategorized

We No Longer Just Have to Consume

What are you going to create?

from Jonathan Zeitlyn’s Print: How You Can Do It Yourself. Journeyman Press. London. 1992.

Zeitlyn’s work fits quite well with Mimeograph Revival’s ethos. He wrote and published on printing and printmaking from a DIY angle. There’s a summary of some of his work here, and you can look here to see if there’s a library copy available near you. I’d be interested to get my hands on both Print and Low Cost Printing for Development: A Printing Handbook for Third World Development and Education now that it’s becoming clearer that my part of the world is quickly heading into a less-developed future.

Mimeograph Revival