drymount to acrylic sheet (plexiglas)

We just ruined an 18 x 18 color Fuji semi-matte photograph by permanently mounting it to acrylic with standard dry mount film. It looks great right out of the press, then over 2-3 minutes, large blisters appear at random locations.

Does anyone have ideas on how to solve this? A small sample with Kodak paper worked great.

I am not the framer (it is my photograph), but I have a lot of experience with engineering industrial processes and know how subtle the causes of defects can be.

tape off the area you are going to adhere the picture too. then with a fine grit sand paper (400 or 800 grit) sand the surface where the picture will be dry mounted to. Then dry mount as you normally would. (make sure you take the tape off before you dry mount. What it needs is a rougher surface with some tooth to it so that the adhesive of the dry mount tissue has something to bond with.

Hi Bob
You will not be able to mount any print to acrylic with heat. For some reason heating up plexi changes the "structure " of the plexi when hot and as it cools down it changes "structure" , I am no brain surgeon on this but if you call Ilford , or better yet a major supplyer of Plexi they will give you the correct info. We cold mount any print onto plexi all the time with no problems. The bubbling will alway occur with heat..
I'm not sure where you are located but if you go to a professional photographic lab in your area they can cold mount for you.
good luck
Bob Carnie

My art supply store sells sheets of an adhesive acrylic film used by many flat artists to permanently mount their paintings. oils, et c. The film, very thin. is sandwitched between sheets of release paper. I have had great success applying both color and b&w prints up to 16x20 inches on "museum" mounting boards.

The product is cut to approximate size and applied to the art - carefully - it is not repositionable. With the adhesive applied to the print, it is cut to exact size, the release paper removed and the art applied to backing.

I have no data concerning archival properties but non of my pictures, properly mounted, have gone south, and I would think most professional artists would eschew this product if it were of truly poor quality. It would make a great back lighted display for a color transparency e. g.

dr bob said:

...I have no data concerning archival properties but non of my pictures, properly mounted, have gone south, and I would think most professional artists would eschew this product if it were of truly poor quality. It would make a great back lighted display for a color transparency e. g.

Click to expand...

We use a 3M acrylic adhesive film to mount flat heaters (basically very thin, flexible circuit boards) to spacecraft skin, thruster motors and various structural elements. The 3M adhesive we use is optically transparent, fully space qualified (-40 deg C to 300 deg C) and chemically inert under those thermal conditions.

The photo mount version 3m acrylic adhesive is probably identical.

dr bob said:

My art supply store sells sheets of an adhesive acrylic film used by many flat artists to permanently mount their paintings. oils, et c.

Click to expand...

Ah!! I'm VERY interested. What is the specific name of this mounting sheet?

I have heard of mounting 'plastic prints', which I'm told are polypropylene on acrylic sheet with pressure sensitive sheet adhesive. A local photographer had 16x24 color enlargements made from 35 mm slides at Corporate Color in Grand Rapids MI using this substrate. It 'orange peels' like crazy with dry mount tissue.

At a trade show, 3M was pushing 568 positionable mounting adhesive for this application. One could either buy into the system 'professionally' with a pressure roller machine or use hard plastic squeegees. We got sample squeegees and bought a box of it but haven't used it on photos.

Also check out CODA products (Mahwah NJ).

Murray