Hi - for some reason on a few of my prints this weekend I have some left over adhesive gum on my prints after I’ve taken duct tape to them, and lightly washed with a toothbrush (works wonders on removing other ash!) on my prints…
It’s gummy to the touch and is ruining the appearance of my engrave… is there any sort of liquid or material I can apply to the PG to remove this extra gum without damaging the engrave?
Thanks!
i would recommend not leaving masking on any engraves that aren’t deep engraves. anything that’s shallow or variable i would etch without masking. for that exact reason.
a lot of people use denatured alcohol to clean up after engraves. i use it for the char, but haven’t tried it on any leftover masking (because i remove it first).
sometimes just rubbing on it with your fingers will get it off, but I wonder if perhaps rubber cement eraser is a better option? those are semi-hard rubber thats used to pick up the excess glue on surfaces of paper and such.
doesn’t that leave smoke marks all over the place?
some. that’s part of why you clean with alcohol after. but you can also just pull the masking off of the area that would be etched. i’ve taken to cutting everything, removing just the part to be engraved, taking the mask off of the etching area from that part and putting it back in the overall sheet, then running the engrave. that leaves everything else still masked.
Ad I had a batch of that Hand Sanitizer about and no denatured alcohol I tried it and have been very happy with the results. it does a very good job of removing both adhesive and the resin from cutting.
If you examine the design you will see that from about 30% greyscale to almost 50% it is scoring through the mask but not cleaning the glue. In fact with masking on the low 20 and 10% greyscale is probably not even showing much in the finished product.
This is why folks recommend removing the masking for engraves.
Search for one of the greyscale test patterns here and experiment with mask on and off.
If you really want to use masking and avoid the edge char, try this.
Ignore all the rest of the design and make a score all the way around the image to be engraved only.
Careful not to move anything, open the door and peel off the masking inside the score.
Close the door and ignore the image mask.
Enable all the rest of engrave, score, and cut operations.
If the material is pinned down (or otherwise not moved), it should all work fine.
wonderful. i should have thought to lightly score the shape out first. i just remasked the area carefully around my engrave.
FWIW, I don’t mask my non-proofgrade wood and just clean up with a toothbrush and little isopropyl alcohol or orange cleaner. Both work well for me.
Love that Fast Orange and we found the large jug for the toothbrush part. The wipes also can clear a lot of the char and resin from the edges.
Great stuff.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’m going to close this thread - if the problem reoccurs, go ahead and post a new topic. Thanks for letting us know about this!
