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Thread: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

  1. #11

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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Sandy,

    Have you made up a home brewed batch of this stuff yet? If so do you just put it in a magnetic stirrer and let it work?

    I'm at my last bit of a Kami bottle and wondering how easy it is to mix at home.

    Oh and I was just trying to be silly with my math comment....

    --JB
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    John Belthoff
    Black & White Film Photographer
    http://www.customfilmworks.com/

  2. #12

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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Quote Originally Posted by JBelthoff View Post
    Sandy,

    Have you made up a home brewed batch of this stuff yet? If so do you just put it in a magnetic stirrer and let it work?

    I'm at my last bit of a Kami bottle and wondering how easy it is to mix at home.

    Oh and I was just trying to be silly with my math comment....

    --JB
    JB,

    Solvent Naphtha, mineral spirits (oil) and methyl alcohol are all liquids so no need for a magnetic stirrer.

    And some time ago I did mix some naphtha with mineral spirit and it looked and acted like Kami. The stuff I mixed was bought at a local hardware store.

    I definitely recommend caution and careful consideration when using chemicals, but very often things we mix at home works as well or better than store bought stuff, and cost a lot less. One of my close friends has ED but unfortunately his insurance won't pay for medication, and the stuff is too expensive for his budget. He could buy the generic medication from Canada or India but is afraid it might harm him. If I were in his shoes I would probably just buy the Indian stuff and take the chance, since for me the desired end usually trumps fear. But we all have to make our own decisions about rewards and risks.

    Sandy
    Last edited by sanking; 29-Nov-2012 at 17:01.
    For discussion and information about carbon transfer please visit the carbon group at groups.io
    [url]https://groups.io/g/carbon

  3. #13
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    MSDS sheets are not required to show all ingredients, just those that fall under a potentially hazardous category and are not otherwise exempted under trade secret. In
    this case, certain solvents might have been interchaged at one time or another due to
    whatever - enviro regs, safety, shpg rules, cost & avail, etc.

  4. #14
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Sandy - mineral spirits and mineral oil are completely different substances! Mineral spirits =
    paint thinner, but mineral oil is nontoxic and you can treat butcher blocks and salad bowls with it. The problem with methyl alcohol for hardware stores is that the water content can
    very significantly, and at a certain point will create havoc. It's common nowadays for
    manufacturers to test their luck by diluting the solution. Methyl alcohol behaves very differently in different degrees of concentration. But it's probably the mineral oil doing most
    of the work in this case.

  5. #15

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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Quote Originally Posted by sanking View Post
    JB,

    Solvent Naphtha, mineral spirits (oil) and methyl alcohol are all liquids so no need for a magnetic stirrer.

    And some time ago I did mix some naphtha with mineral oil and it looked and acted like Kami. The stuff I mixed was bought at a local hardware store.

    I definitely recommend caution and careful consideration when using chemicals, but very often things we mix at home works as well or better than store bought stuff, and cost a lot less. One of my close friends has ED but unfortunately his insurance won't pay for medication, and the stuff is too expensive for his budget. He could buy the generic medication from Canada or India but is afraid it might harm him. If I were in his shoes I would probably just buy the Indian stuff and take the chance, since for me the desired end usually trumps fear. But we all have to make our own decisions about rewards and risks.

    Sandy
    Sandy,

    Thanks. I may just try this out this weekend. The Mineral Spirit version anyway.... I think that is supposed to be the right one.
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
    John Belthoff
    Black & White Film Photographer
    http://www.customfilmworks.com/

  6. #16
    Peter De Smidt's Avatar
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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    What do the other ingredients add that naphtha by itself won't accomplish? Do they up the viscosity?
    “You often feel tired, not because you've done too much, but because you've done too little of what sparks a light in you.”
    ― Alexander Den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know

  7. #17

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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    Sandy - mineral spirits and mineral oil are completely different substances! Mineral spirits =
    paint thinner, but mineral oil is nontoxic and you can treat butcher blocks and salad bowls with it. The problem with methyl alcohol for hardware stores is that the water content can
    very significantly, and at a certain point will create havoc. It's common nowadays for
    manufacturers to test their luck by diluting the solution. Methyl alcohol behaves very differently in different degrees of concentration. But it's probably the mineral oil doing most
    of the work in this case.
    I misspoke because what I mixed was mineral spirits with naphtha. I have never used mineral oil, or had any around that I can recall.

    Sandy
    For discussion and information about carbon transfer please visit the carbon group at groups.io
    [url]https://groups.io/g/carbon

  8. #18

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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    I only had a semester of organic chemistry in college, and I forgot most of it, so I am no expert, but it seems to me that naptha alone wouldn't be such a different substance from naptha mixed with some other miscellaneous volatile hydrocarbons. All of these ingredients are just light fraction hydrocarbons distilled from petroleum at a point somewhere between the gases like methane and the heavier liquids like kerosene. And the name naptha doesn't refer to any specific compound, but rather a range of light hydrocarbons with anything from 5 to 12 carbon atoms. Hexane is just a straight chain hydrocarbon with 6 carbon atoms. So it is normally part of naptha anyway. And mineral spirits is similarly a broad term for a mixture of light hydrocarbons ranging from 7 to 12 carbon atoms. I suspect that all we have here is a range of petroleum distillates and the MSDS lists hexane specifically because of a law that requires it to be listed by itself if it is present. But the hexane isn't likely to be something they added to naptha. The term mineral spirits might generally refer to a mixture with a higher percentage of hydrocarbons leaning more toward the heavy end of the 6-12 carbon range. I think typical mineral spirits is a bit less volatile than naptha, taking longer to evaporate. But they are very similar.

    I don't see why straight naphtha wouldn't work. Even the hardware store stuff seems to evaporate cleanly. I used some VM&P naphtha to degrease some old shutters before relubricating them and I tested it to see if it would leave residue when I evaporated it as I didn't want any oil on the shutter blades. It didn't leave anything behind that I could detect. Some mineral spirits, however, will leave a bit of oily residue upon evaporation. I don't think you want that on your film. The straight naphtha might evaporate a bit too quickly though. You'll just have to try it. It isn't going to hurt anything in any way that the Kami fluid that contains naptha wouldn't. But whatever naphtha you buy should be subjected to an evaporation test to make sure it is residue free. Just pour some onto a sheet of clean glass, allow to evaporate, and then inspect carefully. One way to tell if there is any oily residue that might not be very visible is to put some water drops on it. Clean glass is polar and causes water to spread out on its surface, to "sheet". Oil is nonpolar and water is more attracted to itself than to the oil, so it beads up. Just make sure your glass is super clean to begin with. Wash it with dish soap and dry it and don't touch it with your oily fingers.

    And keep in mind that all of these light hydrocarbon mixtures are harmful and contain carcinogens, to some extent even benzene, which specifically causes leukemia. So use at your own risk and make sure to have plenty of ventilation and, particularly if you are spending much time in close proximity and can readily smell it, a respirator with cartridges for organic solvent vapors, something like this:

    http://www.3m.com/product/informatio...espirator.html

    Wear some purple nitrile gloves too.

    I see no reason to pay Kami's absurd prices for what is a very common and cheap substance.

  9. #19

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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Just a quick word of caution, methyl alcohol can attack some plastics and remove plasticisers leading to crazing.

    It's a polar solvent, thus it's easily mixed with water -miscible.

    Naptha is recommended for film cleaning, and also used by many drum scanner operators for cleaning their drums also.
    It's a non-polar solvent.

    http://www.nfsa.gov.au/preservation/...ents/solvents/

    On the scanhi-end yahoo group, the preferred mounting fluid is liquid paraffin - from the pharmacy - laxative (not kerosene - also called paraffin in the US), not dissolved/diluted with anything, but obviously there needs to be cleaning of both film and drums afterwards.

    peace out

    Glenn
    Last edited by ruckusman; 29-Jan-2013 at 08:01. Reason: clarified the info

  10. #20
    Guilherme Maranhão coisasdavida's Avatar
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    Re: Kami mounting fluid -- Formula

    Quote Originally Posted by ruckusman View Post
    On the scanhi-end yahoo group, the preferred mounting fluid is liquid paraffin - from the pharmacy - laxative (not kerosene - also called paraffin in the US), not dissolved/diluted with anything, but obviously there needs to be cleaning of both film and drums afterwards.
    I tried to find this info there but I couldn't. I found some posts by Ernst about it, but can you direct me to something I've missed?

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