45% Humidity and Ilford FB Still Won't Dry Flat

[Drew Wiley]

Melts MT5 just fine .... That means the press is pretty damn hot - way way too hot for flattening purposes. You're basically cooking them. Flattening under heat should be limited to about 30 seconds at around 200F maximum between two sheet or pre-dried museum board. MT5 melts around 240F! And silicone release paper should never be used directly against an emulsion.

As per plywood, I wasn't referring to general carpentry. I was involved with a pro clientele doing a lot of fancy "book matching" work, truly seamless work involving very expensive plys and hardwoods - major historical restorations, extremely expensive projects, both new and remodel. The big legal complex remodel which held an installation of a number of my large color prints after it was completed (with matching hardwood frames I milled myself), used over 500 sheets of maple ply for just the ceiling, all of them wonderfully bended and "Origami" fitted to look like 3D waves of the sea, way up above a big indoor/outdoor Koi pond. Really Zen.

But even general residential construction framing takes on different connotations here in earthquake country, and plys themselves often are placed in the context of shear values. Special sizes come into play. Local codes can also vary by neighborhood, depending on wildfire risk assessment. It's not like inland CA, with its quickie tract homes and ubiquitous code violations. I'd imagine Colorado is also going go have go do some deep soul searching concerning fire risk, as suburbanization spreads into drought-stricken forest. But this year, it's been more extreme rain and snow that's been the problem here. Wonder how many fallen trees and mudslides I'll have to drive around to just get to a hiking trail this afternoon?

[John Layton]

...if 2x4's/2x6's get any thinner there won't be any center!

[Drew Wiley]

That's what certified ratings and code enforcement is for, John. Nearly everything sold through big box and home center chains is arbitrarily marketed and often code illegal. I don't know what kind of lumber residential framing involves in New England - perhaps white pine? Here in NorCal its traditionally been Douglas fir. SoCal uses a lot of inferior hemlock or Ponderosa pine.

Certified dimensions haven't changed as long as I've been alive (I'm now 73); and legit lumberyards still carry the real deal. And now high quality, dimensionally stable engineered strand and ply composites are taking over. Even my tallest enlarger column is an over-laminated epoxy-impregnated, phenolic glue 6X6 strand beam, more dimensionally stable than structural steel. Serious darkroom equip reinforcement makes a lot of sense when one lives just a few blocks away from an infamous earthquake fault.

[bmikiten]

Nearly everything sold through big box and home center chains is arbitrarily marketed and often code illegal.

Code illegal? Everything I see is stamped and compliant. If you are referring to structural members, building codes specify (in each locality) what should be used but even then, unless you are dealing with earthquake or span issues, I'm not aware of any code being violated by HD, Lowes, etc. Please explain. (I held GC and specialty licenses in 23 states but never heard this one). Architectural specs are pretty clear on what can and can't be used. Just wondering....

[Drew Wiley]

Violations are rampant. False labeling abundant. Inferior product routine. Selection preposterous. Even the gun nails sold generally aren't legally rated. And Texas or Florida standards? - well, I won't even discuss that, since this thread is already drifting (my fault). So this is not the place to explain in detail, though I certainly have the background to do so. But picking on my own Sate, here in CA, it's routine for housing tracts inland to use non-compliant flooring underlayment for siding and roofing applications, illegally. Just about every kind of "inspection" in that part of the world involves bribes, along with foolishness in location, just like our current bottomland flooding disasters make all too apparent. The company I represented wouldn't even sell to those kinds of developers, because those outfits are expert at cheating everyone, including their suppliers.

What I tried to point out on this particular thread was simply the plywood analogy. If there's some kind of expansion/contraction differential one side versus the other, warpage is inevitable unless that material is pinned down. And in this case, it's hard to say if the chronic problem is humidity related, per perhaps improper print paper storage at some point in time; or if that is being exacerbated by too much press heat (an issue I once learned about the hard way, when my own press thermostat spring needed readjustment). Dunno.

[faberryman]

I think the OP needs to do a YouTube of his complete process so we can see exactly what he is doing because apparently no one has encountered the same problem, and there are decades of experience on the board. We must be missing something from the descriptions, unless as someone suggested it is just a bad box of paper. As I recall, the OP was consulting with Ilford about the problem, but I don't think we heard what Ilford had to say.

[Drew Wiley]

Again, the lumber analogy. The hardwoods we sold were mainly related to contractors taking those lengths, and milling them for sake of pinned-down assembly, like cabinet frames or nailed on wall mouldings. Even the kiln-dried selection we sold had issues at the ends, because there was a temp and humidity differential between the aisles of the warehouse, and the metal walls at the distal end of the lengths. Because I had a huge employee discount, I bought my own picture framing stock there, but then had to often cull a bit of the overall length subject to warpage. Ideally, I would have gone to a hardwood specialty supplier a few miles away instead, which stored their entire inventory at consistent humidity; but it wasn't cost or time effective for me to do so.

Application of analogy : most printing paper is in a box with an inner unsealed plastic bag. So it's hypothetically better protected one end more than another. And there have been a few cases in my own experience over the years where older darkroom paper was not stored properly, and even the tape on the outer box broken, and I experienced somewhat the same kind of issue the poster has. But I just trimmed it off.

That kind of poor storage in distribution warehousing issue was in fact the main cause for the decline of Cibachrome in this country. Ciba is polyester, not paper of course, so the symptom was not edge wrinkling, but premature color crossover at the more atmospheric susceptible edge, along with frequent physical damage like dent marks.

[bob carnie]

I think the OP needs to do a YouTube of his complete process so we can see exactly what he is doing because apparently no one has encountered the same problem, and there are decades of experience on the board. We must be missing something from the descriptions, unless as someone suggested it is just a bad box of paper. As I recall, the OP was consulting with Ilford about the problem, but I don't think we heard what Ilford had to say.

The OP mentions in Post 30 that it is horrendously dry , under 10%... In Canada the humidity drops in the winter drastically and when I was racking up a lot of days printing in dry rooms I had the exact problem he/she is having in our case we lost a day of printing. I am printing these last two weeks large day runs of silver prints.. It is dry outside but inside our building I have cranked up the humidity above 50 percent in the drying area and then take the prints directly to the hot press so there is not time to start drying out. We are getting flat prints, not RC flat but fibre base is never RC flat.
When printing multiple register prints in Gum over palladium we have the same issues with paper and we pre shrink and keep the rooms above 50% its just the nature of the beast. Nov 16 the humidifiers come on here in Toronto and April 16 the dehumidiers are needed.

[ASA1000]

Yet another Update
Yesterday I dug out some 30-year-old fiber prints I made on Ilford Gallery paper. I wet one in a try with running water for 30 minutes, blotted the water off it and laid it out on the screen.It dried like this

Then I took one of my recent Ilford MGFB paper prints and did the same.

You can see the wrinkle in the new paper is much more severe and along one edge where as the old paper wrinkled more universally on all edges. Humidity was 28 in the room and 70-deg.
One thing I am finding is when I re-wet a finished print (before flattening in the press) and dry it for a second time on the screen again, it seems to dry a little less severely wrinkled. I'll be printing again next week so I will explore this more.

As far as press temperature, I just used MT5 as an old time reference. In the past (in my darkroom in Santa Fe) I would do MT5 at 215 and I would flatten at 180-degrees for 45 seconds, open then press, air it out, and give it another 30 sec. I am using a heavy acid free watercolor paper on top and below the print for flattening.... but the problem here, in Colorado, is prints are totally dry when I take them off the screen in 3 hours. That's why I was talking about raining the humidifier down directly on the prints to slow it up.... but that hasn't worked.

And I'm not ruling out bad paper storage before it gets to me. I've been buying from BH and I've had some outdated selenium and some outdated photoflo I got from them and when they replaced it I got more outdated stuff, so who knows what is going on with them. The fact that there is no real moisture barrier in the paper box could also be an issue. I'll do a process video next week.

....and Drew, that project sounded pretty cool! Me, I was building block and stucco houses in Florida!

[Drew Wiley]

Well, I sure don't want to detract from B&H because they have served me well for decades. But in more recent years, FB Graded Galerie has fallen out of popularity, and gotten hard to find, and when a box of 16X20 Gr3 was on hand at B&H it arrived to me looking like a geriatric box indeed. I seldom use this paper, but needed something cold toned when both Polygrade V and Kentmere Fineprint dried up, prior to current Classic Cooltone. The local camera store had multiple boxes of Galerie graded on hand in 11X14; but those were so ridiculously outdated that petrified dinosaur dung would probably need to be swept off the boxes. And yes, excess waviness on the leading edge of the paper, facing the opening in the inner plastic bag, in that old box I received from B&H, was something I attributed to it probably having been stored in some remote corner of the warehouse for way too long under less than ideal humidity conditions. Fortunately, the prints came out fine; but I alway do leave margins and trim afterwards.