What's the best way to coat metal plates with Liquid Light emulsion?

[Bruce Schultz]

I just coated my first set of metal plates using the Rockland kit with Ag Plus emulsion. I had my emulsion pretty warm and I tried spreading the emulsion with bare fingers but it seemed pretty blotchy. Is there a way of getting a nice, even coating?

[Sparky]

what might be a good way to spread... oh, let's say PAINT on a surface...?

[Bruce Schultz]

It was uneven and splotchy also. I'm thinking I need to warm up the plates so that the emulsion doesn't cool down when it is poured on the surface.

[agGNOME]

Hi Bruce,
Are you using any subbing material? Metals need to be cleaned (try alcohol), then coated with polyurethane..dried , then coated with liquid emulsion

[Bruce Schultz]

I'm using the plate material from Rockland that's already painted. One problem I'm having that may be leading to my difficulties: the directions with the kit recommends a thin coat, so should the coating be thin enough that you can still see the black surface of the plate?

[Photo Engineer]

Coating with a brush will always leave some brush marks. Spraying the emulsion on is another option just as you might use paint and spray it on.

Foam brushes work but often leave bubbles.

Wire wrapped glass or steel rods work well but are messy.

The coating should be at least 0.002" and not more than 0.01" thick and show no or as little black plate as possible.

PE

[magic823]

I've used a hvlp sprayer (same type used in woodworking) to spray liquid emulsion on canvas. Its the only way I've found to get an even coat.

[Photo Engineer]

The difficulty in coatling liquid emulsions is why I came up with the coating blade.

But in any event, one trick to better uniformity coating any emulsion is to use a spreading agent such as photo flo. One half ml / 100 ml of emulsion should help a lot.

PE

[Bruce Schultz]

Tell me more about the coating blade, PE. WHere do you get one or how is one made?

[richard ide]

PE
Is that photo flo concentrate? and if so which of the 3 concentrations?

Thank you