Is museo silver rag paper made by museofineart oba free or was the crane version the last of the oba free silver rag? the last box i bought states the media is oba free,but i am looking on the ardenburg site and it states it contains oba's. thank for any info on this matter in advance! Milt
You caught a very subtle issue that is indeed in the Aardenburg database. I did receive one batch of Museo Silver Rag from an AaI&A member that did exhibit very low levels of OBA. All other batches in test have been OBA-free. I doubt this batch has enough OBA to influence the AaI&A testing outcome, but it was detectable by my instrumentation and by examination with UV blacklight. It was essentially a residual amount of contamination in the paper base and not in the ink receptor coating. Intellicoat doesn't manufacture the paper base. The base used to be manufactured by Crane. I don't know if Intellicoat has now gone to other paper suppliers or not. However, Intellicoat buys paper and and then coats it which means it doesn't have control of the paper making process. Intellicoat must rely on the supplier to deliver to specification. While I'm pretty sure the specification is still for OBA free paper base, it appears at least one batch was purchased that did have a tiny amount of OBA in it. Paper mills often make both types of papers, and it's not unusual for some manufacturing scrap to be recycled into another new run. However, the paper mill has to do it's best to make sure that the recyle furnish is the same as the next run. If the paper company employees overlooked that the next run was to be OBA free, then you could have a situation where small residuals of OBAs show up in an OBA-free specified paper. I can't say for certain that's what happened, but in view of the very low level I detected, I suspect that might be the case for this batch.
Again, the batch that showed trace level OBAs will probably do just fine in test. There's not enough OBA present to show noticeable burnout.
These things happen
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
