A WET WET WEEKEND AHEAD - GOD HELP ME - UPDATE

Oh no i didn't, did i?

So help me i did. I created myself my own little one man pulp war here at Darkside HQ. Oh well since it is just between me & me the casualties should be low lol.

The plan was to make the first stage magazine pulp for my pulp/plaster mix experiments yesterday. Then today do the second stage. For those who have never made pulp there are a number of methods artists use. I use a simple two part method.

STAGE 1: Run a required amount of paper (varies)  through a blender with cold water. Spread it out to dry overnight or as long as required this depends on batch size normally just the one magazine is enough for my meager uses. Then when fully dried i break it all down into manageable nuggets.

STAGE 2: Take the dried nuggets then run through the blender again 'dry' until they become a fluffy lint like form. Voila' instant pulp. Just add chosen glue as required.

Now i was not going to mention this next bit (& won't fully yet!) as well as my pulp/plaster mix experiment i am running another pulp based experiment too, but full details on 'what' that is another time. For now i will tell you i am experimenting with toilet roll inners for a pulp too. I hadn't planned to initially as i am collecting the inners to use in a creation another time.  Along the way someone dumped a load of heavy items on a half black bin liner of tubes crushing them. Since they were then useless to me crushed rather than waste them i decided to use them in another pulp experiment. Anyway seeing as the tube inners are made of thicker paper i decided to tear these up then let them stand in a medium bucket of water for a couple of days, three in all, before pulping them.

Now back to this one man pulp war of mine.

It took me a little over thirty minutes to pulp  a single computer magazine (disabled remember in which i have llimited use of left arm & lower back?) to a satisfactory first stage pulp (see stages above 1 & 2) which i set to one side to drain then dry on a wooden board above a radiator.

After a brief break (okay an hour) i got to doing the toilet roll inner tube pulp too. Now my current blender has a two litre capacity. In which i was able to render down around twenty to twenty five glossy magazine pages per load in around two minutes a load. In the end i only pulped a single magazine which believe it or not gives you one sizable batch. Enough for my needs right now anyway.

Now the inner tube pulp was a different story all together which is why i am in part mentioning it here. Whilst i could only load around two handfuls (around two pounds wet - straight from the bucket) i found i had to use around one & a half litres of water each load so the blender could cope. as apposed to a couple of cup fulls of water for each load of magazine pages. However, to my amazement each two pound load or so only took me under a minute each (around thirty seconds or so) to render down to an incredibly fine mushy pulp that was almost a thick soup like in texture. Not only was the inner tube pulp at least two times finer than my glossy magazine pulp at stage one. I also pulped TWICE the amount in under ten minutes too - Awesome!. See the two pulps below:

The PC glossy magazine pulp is the grey pulp on the left. The toilet roll inner tube pulp is on the right.

This is where the pulp war comes into play lol. I am torn between which pulp to use in my pulp/plaster mix experiment now. I think i will wait until i have put 'both' pulps through stage two (the final stage) before i commit myself & these pulps to the test.

The war is on who will claim victory me or the enemy me?

More soon.