Lacquer formulae

[selectavision]

Hallo and happy new year 2021 to everybody!

If you are interested in recording lacqers and their composition, you cannot avoid the basic literature. Here is a German publication from 1952: Kraus, Alfred: Handbuch der Nitrocelluloselacke, Publisher: Wilhelm Pansegrau Verlag in the Westliche Berliner Verlagsgesellschaft Heenemann KG. Copyright 1952
There, on pages 115 and 116, two recipes are given in detail. The starting raw materials and quantities are precisely named, e.g. "Collodion wool of viscosity H22". Other substances, on the other hand, do not seem to be known anymore or common today, e.g. "Leukofix" (is that a resin, a hardener or a plasticizer?)
Further interesting literature is given in this book:
R.J. Ledwith, Some developments in Cellulose Lacquers, J. Oil Col. Chem. Assoc. 29 (315), 214 (1946)
F. Fraenkel, record coatings for self-recording, Kunststoffe 23, 80 (1933)
These two titles are not monographs, but rather essays that have appeared in specialist journals and therefore are subjet to a more difficult retrieval.

I found all of this nevertheless to be interesting information on the basics. The extent to which one can still put something of this into practice today will primarily be a matter of availability of those raw materials. The chemists in our forum will most likely be able to answer that. Then in the next step the technology of lacquer processing and application -e.g. the related coating techniques come into view (centrifuge? Curtain coater? Drying process?) For copyright reasons, I am not adding the above recipes here. Neither can I say if they can still be used under today´s standards. I have the book in my possession, so if interested pm me for the content of those two pages.
In view of the Apollo Masters catastrophe, it is at least sensible to pay more attention to the historical development of lacqers and their technical evolution from now on. Only when historical development details and technical information have been recovered can one think of reverse engineering of lacqers and their subsequent processing-techniques. Most of the basic literature on this seems - at least according to my first research - to be very old ("antique"). This knowledge must very likely have been available e.g. to Pyral (La Societe des Vernis Pyrolac, Paris) when they started recording lacqers at the time. Today, as far as I know, the company operates under the name “astral” - a division of the Akzo Nobel Group, still with some nitro lacquers in their portfolio.
In the other scenario, if nothing works and nobody comes up with a usable and ideally environmetally friendly formula, we shure will end up with completely different materials one way or another, and in conjunction with that most likely with a heavily adapted recording procedure.
So it´s time to collect as much as we can verifiable and scientifically proven information, facts and data.

Bye for now,
Martin

[symatic]

nice one Martin!