On Feb 14, 2011, at 7:04 PM, David Love wrote: > It’s easy to imagine that the lacquer my both get absorbed into the > interior of the outer tube and also coat the exterior of the tube. > Soaking the hammers in thinner for purposes of extraction might well > float the lacquer off the exterior of the fibers but might do less > well extracting it from the interior. That would concur with some > people’s experience (as Dell said he experienced) that soaking might > improves things somewhat but it’s not quite like starting over with > a fresh, unadulterated piece of felt. I certainly don't disagree. The residual lacquer could be bits still left on the surface, or it could be that some of the nitrocellulose penetrates the fibers themselves. I suspect an electromicrograph of treated fibers wouldn't answer the question, though it might show what happens on the surface. If it penetrates the fibers themselves, it stiffens them from within, rather than just providing a hard and rather brittle coating. Some interesting food for thought, in trying to visualize what is happening when you add hardeners, and when you insert needles into lacquered felt. In either case, the effect is that of making a material that is less dense act similar to one that is more dense, by stiffening its fibers. Up to a point, at least, because when too much material is added, it seems to fill in the gaps between the fibers and create an amalgam that needles can't penetrate. With more mildly treated hammers, the needle goes in readily and seems to "crunch" the fibers apart (it feels and sort of sounds like something glassy coating the fibers is breaking, but it could be crystals within the fibers being shattered). Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu "Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them." Coco Chanel -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20110214/ceeec4c9/attachment.htm>
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