De Smidt Dedustinator 15

[faberryman]

Fab - the fllm room isn't the only place to worry about. What about inevitable changing of roll film in the field? What about setting up a shot on a seemingly remote 4WD track, and then some jerk suddenly roars by stirring up dust. What about the past three weeks here, where every single day has been howling wind right at the peak of pollen season? Maybe all that smoke coming down from the north will reach you too - Have a dust collector big enough for half of North America?

Who knows? Maybe all the smoke is actually coming for Bob fuming glass plates, or allowing his gum arabic kettle to catch fire while he's crawling around on the floor looking for an escaped newt or toad necessary for an old witch's formula.

I clean my negative and my glass negative carrier before I make a print.

[Drew Wiley]

... which you no doubt in turn clean using 60-grit sandpaper. The top of my truck needs that kind of Simonize treatment. Who doesn't clean their carrier glass and negs on this forum? The question is, do you do that wearing a linty cotton shirt, with the cat rubbing up to your hand? - better than a porcupine, I guess. But it might be more pertinent to pose the question exactly HOW do you clean your glass? I'm still looking for the silver bullet. So let me be the first to state my own method, and hopefully solicit
alternate answers.

I take the carrier glass to the sink, scrub it with the most gentle kind of nylon mesh pad I can find using vinegar Windex. Then I gently hose it off (our water here has very little mineral content), and blow all the remaining beads of water off using my micro-filtered air line at low PSI (30 PSI), then set the two sheets in my clean room to dry. When I install the sheets back into whatever carrier, they're carefully examined with reading glasses under an inspection light next to the intake side of a large air purifier. Same for film. And when working with multiple sheets of film needing to be exposed in register, I swab and mop down the entire room in advance. I never do FB black and white printing in the same room during the same general timeframe as critical color work - too much lint risk. I cut my teeth on large static-prone Cibachromes, which are hell to retouch. It proved to be a beneficial bootcamp experience.

[faberryman]

... which you no doubt in turn clean using 60-grit sandpaper. The top of my truck needs that kind of Simonize treatment. Who doesn't clean their carrier glass and negs on this forum? The question is, do you do that wearing a linty cotton shirt, with the cat rubbing up to your hand? - better than a porcupine, I guess. But it might be more pertinent to pose the question exactly HOW do you clean your glass? I'm still looking for the silver bullet. So let me be the first to state my own method, and hopefully solicit
alternate answers.

I take the carrier glass to the sink, scrub it with the most gentle kind of nylon mesh pad I can find using vinegar Windex. Then I gently hose it off (our water here has very little mineral content), and blow all the remaining beads of water off using my micro-filtered air line at low PSI (30 PSI), then set the two sheets in my clean room to dry. When I install the sheets back into whatever carrier, they're carefully examined with reading glasses under an inspection light next to the intake side of a large air purifier. Same for film. And when working with multiple sheets of film needing to be exposed in register, I swab and mop down the entire room in advance. I never do FB black and white printing in the same room during the same general timeframe as critical color work - too much lint risk. I cut my teeth on large static-prone Cibachromes, which are hell to retouch. It proved to be a beneficial bootcamp experience.

So you do all that and still have to spot your prints? Puzzling.

[Michael R]

I just use lens cleaner fluid and microfiber cloths.

... which you no doubt in turn clean using 60-grit sandpaper. The top of my truck needs that kind of Simonize treatment. Who doesn't clean their carrier glass and negs on this forum? The question is, do you do that wearing a linty cotton shirt, with the cat rubbing up to your hand? - better than a porcupine, I guess. But it might be more pertinent to pose the question exactly HOW do you clean your glass? I'm still looking for the silver bullet. So let me be the first to state my own method, and hopefully solicit
alternate answers.

I take the carrier glass to the sink, scrub it with the most gentle kind of nylon mesh pad I can find using vinegar Windex. Then I gently hose it off (our water here has very little mineral content), and blow all the remaining beads of water off using my micro-filtered air line at low PSI (30 PSI), then set the two sheets in my clean room to dry. When I install the sheets back into whatever carrier, they're carefully examined with reading glasses under an inspection light next to the intake side of a large air purifier. Same for film. And when working with multiple sheets of film needing to be exposed in register, I swab and mop down the entire room in advance. I never do FB black and white printing in the same room during the same general timeframe as critical color work - too much lint risk. I cut my teeth on large static-prone Cibachromes, which are hell to retouch. It proved to be a beneficial bootcamp experience.

[Drew Wiley]

I have that at the workstation too, Michael; but it never really cleans the glass well enough for me. And film cleaner per se works a lot better on real film than on carrier glass. My favorite microfiber lens cloths are the 3M dimpled kind. I've heard of ultrasonic cleaning baths shattering thin glass. Ultra-clean peel-away coatings as sometimes used in the final stages of lens manufacture are too expensive, unhealthy, and tedious for personal use. I've tried all kinds of methods, and ended up pretty much standardizing on what I described earlier.

As per Fab's predictable sniping - NO! - I don't do much color print spotting at all, maybe 15 min in total the past three months. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone with a cleaner workflow when it really counts.
But FB prints have more issues needing it. Minor flaws in the paper itself occur. Any major boost in contrast when VC printing exaggerates any flaws in the film or glass itself. Little Chihuahua MF shots hoping to run in the same pack as big dog prints obviously require a greater degree of enlargement, with greater attention to tiny blemishes.