Finding bellows material
I'm not going to get historical about bellows material here. What we all need is a suitable material with which to make a bellows and what they used 115 years ago probably isn't available today and may not have been ideal anyway.
There's much talk about rubberised fabric, blackout fabric, waterproof nylon and even the pvc inner bag from photographic paper boxes. I don't like the sound of any of them, although I may try the blackout fabric sometime. The thing that got me moving on this was finding an article by a chap in Taiwan called Salihonba. In his blog he describes how he uses patterned silk to make bellows. By applying several coats of black acrylic paint, the material becomes completely sealed to light and, best of all, remains relatively thin and pliable. And they look gorgeous...
There's a lot of potential for colours here, too - an outer coat to colour the silk then inner black coats to seal against light.
At the moment, though, I'm working on a budget so I used curtain liner, which is a close-weave calico (100% cotton). I dyed this black with a clothes dye, although I'm not sure that stage was worth it. This was followed by seven coats of artists' quality black acrylic paint. I got a cheap one - I don't think Windsor & Newton is really needed for this.
The paint was thinned 50-50 with water and for the first two coats was worked well into the material from both sides. Subsequent coats, except the last one, were all applied to one side. After the six coats, there were still some pinholes, but I judged that the paper strips and the black liner would probably eliminate these.
Important: Allow each coat to dry completely, otherwise you'll just be pushing paint through the cloth.
The final coat I applied to the outside of the completed bellows. Inevitably, there will be glue marks and maybe pencil marking out. The final coat hides these.
The results can be seen above. I haven't tested them for light-tightedness, but I'm confident they'll be okay.
I'll say more about bellows design and construction later.
posted by leo ponton @ 05:38
2 Comments
2 Comments:
There are certainly a lot of details like that to take into consideration. That is a great point to bring up. I offer the thoughts above as general inspiration but clearly there are questions like the one you bring up where the most important thing will be working in honest good faith. I don?t know if best practices have emerged around things like that, but I am sure that your job is clearly identified as a fair game. Both boys and girls feel the impact of just a moment?s pleasure, for the rest of their lives.
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