Part 1 - Metal plate drypoint - reusing a failed polymer plate

Nuthatch

metal plate drypoint with hand-colouring

Recently I did a bit of re-organizing of some boxes of items for use in my print studio. One item that I came across was a small box of printing plates (polymer coated) that had failed either during exposure of artwork onto the surface or the image did not wash out successfully during developing of plates in water. I had decided at the times when failure occurred to hold on to the plates and see if I could salvage them for another use.

During the process of cleaning off some old ink I noticed that rinsing the plate in hot water caused the hardened polymer on the plate surface to soften. I wondered if it might be possible to remove the polymer altogether so made it a mission to figure out how this might be achieved.

I thought perhaps applying heat with a hair dryer might work, and unfortunately it didn't provide the heat required.  I also didn't have an electric paint stripping gun which might have produced the temperature to soften the coating. 

As hot water had worked initially I decided why not immerse the plate into boiling hot water and let it sit for a few minutes. 

I thought maybe the polymer might remove easily with a fine steel wool. Instead it lifted off a gummy mess which fused into the steel wool bundle as the temperature of the coating cooled.

What did appear to work was scraping off the coating with a thin steel scraper tool that I use for removal of paint off windows.

However when the plate was removed from the boiling water I only had less than five minutes before the polymer would start to re-harden making it difficult to scrape and release off the plate. What I had to do was re-immerse the plate into boiling water and then continue.  The good news is this method worked and I successfully stripped all the coating from the thin stainless steel plate surface.

After scraping all the coating off I took some fine grade sandpaper and gave the surface a sanding using first up and down strokes with the paper then rotating the plate sideways and going across the metal at 90 degrees. I followed this with extra fine sanding sponge (same direction) and then a wipe with a clean rag.

Next post you can read about and view photos of a small new work that began as a drawing onto the metal and then worked into using a drypoint needle.