Anyone know the oil used to wetscan?

[Dean Jones]

I have a Howtek 4500 drum scanner, but I`m running out of the oil used to wet mount.
Does anyone know what to use? The stuff I have cleans off with metho and works well,
but it`s in a clear bottle. :confused:
Someone suggested Johnson`s Baby oil? :)

[Ron Marshall]

Have a read of this thread:

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?t=22514&highlight=scanning+fluid

[Kirk Gittings]

I believe many people have been using Baby Oil or mineral oil. I know Sandy King has. Do a search on this site. I bought some to experiment with but haven't gotten around to it. I have been using Lumina.

[Rich Voninski]

I use Kami Fluid which you can buy from www.aztek.com

RichieV

[Bruce Watson]

I have a Howtek 4500 drum scanner, but I`m running out of the oil used to wet mount.
Does anyone know what to use? The stuff I have cleans off with metho and works well,
but it`s in a clear bottle. :confused:
Someone suggested Johnson`s Baby oil? :)

Ah man, don't go there. Risking the destruction of a scanner drum by using questionable fluids is just amazingly false economy.

Use drum scanner mounting fluids. You can get them from at least two places in NA. You can get Kami fluids from Aztek. (http://www.aztek.com/Products/Aztek%20Imaging%20-%20Scanning%20Supplies(main).htm) You can get Prazio anti-Newton oil and cleaning fluids from Prazio (http://prazio.com/supplies.shtml) in Canada.

Never let film cleaner touch a scanner drum. Clean mounting fluid off a drum with drum cleaner only.

[John Kasaian]

Will suntan lotion give you a warmer look?
heh-heh

[Ted Harris]

The easiest fluid to apply and easiest to remove is Prazio Anti Newton Ring Spray. Moreover it is the lightest of the available fluids and most of the time is all you need. I seldom use anything else unless I have a very difficult piece of film with lots of deep scratches, etc. You canget Prazio products direct from them at http://www.prazio.com/ As an added bonus their products are generally less expensive than similar products from Aztek.

[sanking]

Ah man, don't go there. Risking the destruction of a scanner drum by using questionable fluids is just amazingly false economy.


Just for the record I have never recommended the use of Johnson's baby oil on a drum scanner. I have used it both on a flatbed and with fluid mounting on a Leafscan 45, but never on a drum scanner. It was, however, recommended to me by a person with extensive experience in operating drum scanners and I assumed he himself had used it.

I use Johnson's baby oil for one reason only. In long scans on my flatbed, and one the Leaf, the mounting fluids evaporate quickly and the material that is being scanned separates from the glass. The greater viscosity and slower evaporation rate of baby oil prevents this from happening, so in these cases it serves my needs better than other fluids.

Personally I am concerned as the next person about damage to my negatives. However, in the absence of any specific studies that indicate otherwise I see no reason to believe that Kami or Prazio mounting fluids are any less or more safe than plain baby oil. If anyone knows of any such studies, please point me to them.

Sandy King

[Bruce Watson]

Just for the record I have never recommended the use of Johnson's baby oil on a drum scanner.

And just for the record, I didn't say that you did.


Personally I am concerned as the next person about damage to my negatives. However, in the absence of any specific studies that indicate otherwise I see no reason to believe that Kami or Prazio mounting fluids are any less or more safe than plain baby oil. If anyone knows of any such studies, please point me to them.

I didn't address the danger to films from mounting and cleaning products. I addressed the danger to scanner drums.

To my understanding, scanner drums (AFAIK, all are some form of acrylic) have little in common with flat bed scanner surfaces (AFAIK, all are some form of glass). Scanner drums are much more susceptable to damage, both physical (scratches, gouges, dropping them taking them out of round or breaking, etc.) and chemical (acrylic drums can contain a fair amount of stress if not fully annealed, and are also more chemically reactive than glass which is why cleaning them with film cleaner does permanent damage).

To learn more about this one would want to talk to the manufacturers. Unfortunately, most are out of business. Of the ones still operating, I doubt one can find any of the original engineers and/or chemists who did the original design work on scanner drums. All we have to go by are published recomendations. And of course the decades of experience by thousands of drum scanner operators using the products approved by those manafacturers.

I'm not saying you can't drum scan with baby oil. One can drum scan with a huge variety of fluids. But just because one can, doesn't mean that one should, or that it's safe to do so, either for the film (your topic) or for the equipment (my topic).

I'm just warning of the consequences of using products not designed for the duty. I don't want the OP ruin a drum and wonder why nobody warned him. So I'm warning him. That's all.

[Ted Harris]

As Bruce said .... same holds for using any of the fluids carelessly on the beds of the prosumer scanners. You can start to melt or degrade some of the plastic parts, for example, with Kami fluid.

Bottom line to me is that while some of the fluids are a bit expensive as packaged they still last a long long time so why take chances?