[QUOTE=airdave;212953]This was brought to mind, by an earlier post that included the question:
"Anybody know where you can get clear paper from?"
I found this:
Quote:
. Paper can be made as transparent as glass,
and capable of being substituted for it for many purposes,
by spreading over it (with a feather) a very thin layer of resin dissolved in spirits of wine.
Fine thin post paper is best, and the mixture must be applied on both sides
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Quote:
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Any thoughts on this?
Anyone ever attempt this?
My interest is peaked!...
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This is an old thread from 2011 and I noticed no one responded to it with the real answer. This method comes from the old days when glass was not readily available and also was very expensive. Even in the late 1800's when the article that was quoted was published in a book there was still a lot of frontier territory in the USA where glass was not an affordable option due to the restrictions of transportation. Glass was not so difficult to get where the railroad lines ran but there was a lot of territory that was not yet covered by rail lines. A few of the wagon train pioneers carried a precious supply of glass but you can imagine the survival rate of that on the rough trails.
The resin they are talking about is not epoxy resin. It would have been lacquer, possibly in flake form or in small chunks. Lacquer is tree resin. To obtain the alcohol you could distill wine. Therefore the directions for using "spirits of wine" Nowadays we just call it "lacquer thinner". They treated the paper to make it more water resistant and the treatment made it stronger as well. The paper that treated this way would develop more transparency, a poor man's glass substitute. Paper windows were not that unusual in many of the Asian countries, we call them Shoji.
It's use in paper modeling? That's easy a lot of people coat their models with clear lacquer to strengthen and protect them. Now all you have to do is try using a suitably thinned coat and see what happens when you apply it to a piece of thin white paper. It will have to soak all the way into the paper. You might need a strong Japanese paper or cotton paper to make it work properly. I think clear as glass is an exaggeration but most certainly it will be nicely translucent.