Dry Mount Adhesive used in heat-sealed cardboard slide mounts

vendo81d

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Does anyone know what type of adhesive is used in heat-sealed cardboard slide mounts? Since no one is selling this mounts at the moment, I have been looking into making my own mounts. I am trying to make something like the Pic Mounts that B&H was selling until recently. I have decided that the cardboard portion of the mount is 130 lb cardstock, but I can't figure out what material was used for the "square" that goes on one side of the frame to seal it (it's the white part in the photo). It's got to be some sort of dry mount material that is heat-activated, but the dry mount film used for photographs is heated much longer than the few seconds a slide mounting press uses. The only thing I'm finding on eBay at the moment are highly overpriced old Kodak Ready Mounts.

I reached out to Dwayne's to see if they could tell me what type of adhesive is used. This is what I was told:

"I checked with management and they said, unfortunately we have no idea what type of adhesive is used on the slide mounts. Likewise we do not know any other specifics about the manufacturing as the company we originally purchased from went out of business over a decade ago. We are currently using up the last of our 20 year old stock and do not have replacement options available."

I was under the mistaken impression that Dwayne's was making mounts, but this is not the case - so they're in the same boat as the rest of us and I can understand why they want to retain their remaining stock.

I am going to investigate a material called "heat n bond" that is used by crafters. You can get it at Joann Fabric and Crafts or Michaels. It sounds like it might work, but I need to investigate to find out.
 

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vendo81d

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I got a different story from Dwayne's today. As I originally suspected, they can still make mounts. They just don't want to sell them to anyone else. I got this reply from them today"

"From what I understand we have plenty of stock still for customers sending in film we just can't afford to make or sell anymore on the side. The lab needs to focus on the slide orders we have in house and make that the main focus/priority."
 
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vendo81d

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I ended up finding a guy on eBay who had a lot of Pic brand heat-sealed mounts and I made a deal to buy all of them. Some of them were custom mounts and they have one line of printing on them, but I just cover it up with Wite-out tape. He also had some plain mounts that I bought, but they're more aged and some of them are water damaged. Anyway, I have enough mounts now to last me a few years.
 

DREW WILEY

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At one time lots of heat sealing adhesive was shellac - iron-on clothing patches, gasket adhesive, iron-on shelf edging, even early drymounting tissue. So that could hypothetically have been used for slide mounts too. But then other heat sealants came into play; so a lot might depends on when the mounts were actually manufactured.

But if you do go with a drymount tissue, realize that projectors can get pretty warm, so you might want to choose a higher temp tissue like old MT5.
 

koraks

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Why not use a regular double-sided adhesive tape in sheet form and assemble slide mounts from pieces of carboard that way? I suppose it's even possible to get cardboard frames cut to one's specification at reasonable cost these days. Laser cut for small numbers, die cut for larger numbers.
 

DREW WILEY

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Ordinary double-sided tape will probably fail over time and under temperature. There is a far superior thin (and more expensive) type sold in narrow rolls intended for archival encapsulation purposes. It's NOT "document repair tape", but 3M no. 415 polyester encapsulation tape. It's a very specific product not to be confused with other double-sided tapes. It will hold long-term on either plastic or paper. In this country, both Talas and B&H sell it. Don't expect to find it in an ordinary art store.

If your mounts are simply cardboard, you could use an ordinary dextrin glue stick (for the mount itself, not for holding the film in position).
 
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koraks

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Thanks for adding that, Drew. I agree tape may fail over time. Many adhesives will as long as you wait long enough. In the end, something archaic like hardened gelatin might prove to be among the most permanent options - but it would be a b*tch to work with in this application.

I was going through some cardboard mounted slides last week; they were from the late 1960s. Most of them were still neatly stuck together, but one or two seemed to have failed. I think moisture was the culprit, but it's hard/impossible to reconstruct what went wrong exactly. Overall, the mounts held up a lot better than the dyes on those particular slides.
 

DREW WILEY

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I still have my old Kodak carousel projector up on a shelf. But most of those slides are in Gepe plastic mounts. There was nothing better than a good old slide show (or worse, depending on whose tedious show it was).
 
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