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Response to Drying Negatives

from Thomas Wollstein (wollstein@compuserve.com)
Here's the method I have perfected over the years for my 35 mm films after I scratched a few negatives using a squeegee:

1) Soak the film in a wetting-agent solution preferably made with demineralised water.

2) Put the spiral in a salad centrifuge (in Germany you can buy these things for something like 3 to 5 USD) and rotate it at the fastest speed you manage to maintain for a minute or so. The speed will be the faster the better the centrifuge is balanced. If you wish to process one film only, put a balancing mass into the centrifuge on the side opposite to the film. With two identical films in identical sprials it works best.

If you then take the film out of the spiral, there is no water left on the surface, so there are no drying marks, and the films dries fairly quickly.

With 120 films, the method should work, too, provided your centrifuge is big enough to take the spiral(s).

Years ago, I read the suggestion in a book to do the same thing with a spin dryer for laundry. Thank god, I tried it with a test film w/o anything on it, because the centrifugal force made the film collapse under its own mass.

I don't think you will be able to generate such forces using a manually driven centrifuge, because with such a lightweight plastic thing, even small deviations from perfect balance (as are inevitable) will have the effect of making it very hard to drive the thing faster than at moderate speeds. (The steel drum of the spin dryer will hardly feel an unbalance even if you fail to insert a balancing mass.) Still, even at these slow speeds, the surface water is extracted.

(posted 9117 days ago)

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