De Roller - Homemade

[ozphoto]

Does any one have a successful de-roller to take the curves out of rolled paper. I refuse to buy that bienfang thing.

[Gene Coggins]

Save an empty roll paper core, end cap and the brown sheet that covered the roll paper.

Tape one end of the brown cover sheet to the roll paper core. Unroll the taped cover sheet and place your printed sheet near the taped end and reverse roll it onto the core. Place three or four large rubber bands or strips of Velcro equal-spaced over the reversed rolled print. Place the core vertically onto one of the end caps and let it sit overnight.

Cost is essentially nothing.

Gene

[Alan Goldhammer]

http://bgpictures.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/decurl.pdf for plans and here is an old LuLa thread that comes up under Google but not the LuLa search engine:  http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?action=printpage;topic=23060.0

[Rob Reiter]

I made one using a two inch core from a roll of Breathing Color Canvas. It has the advantage of being covered with a thin sheet of foam. One thing you'll want to do is, when you roll up a print and first come around to the edge , lift the core slightly to avoid the edge creating a slight distortion in the paper as the remainder of the sheet wraps around.

I also have a D-Roller and while it works well, it's expensive and I feel the 1" core is too small. Some paper's surfaces crack from the tight curling. And after about seven year's usage, the plastic sheet is cracking. But with the two inch one I made, I don't feel the need to spend several hundred dollars replacing the commercial one.

[MikeWhitten]

From a tip I picked up here on LuLa - check Lowes for Blue Hawk 140-ft x 2.92-ft Paper Drop Cloth. It ran me about $9.00.

[kentana]

I have benefitted from this site for the past decade. Finally I get to contribute.
I am using some very tightly rolled photo paper to print gift cards and other very large prints.
My solution to the problem was an old pull down plastic window blind with the staples on the roll replaced by tape.
Typically the stiff cardboard roll of the blind has a diameter of about 1 inch which is perfect. Rolling the prints in the blind against the print curl and leaving them for about 12 hours works a charm. The time required will depend on the paper and the humidity in the air. On a damp day 3 to 6 hours is usually inadequate.
After the prints come out of the blind roller, they will momentarily have curl in the opposite direction. After the print is allowed to sit on a flat surface for an hour or more, the fibres in the paper relax allowing the sheet to assume the flat form in which the paper was manufactured. If some of the initial curl remains, put the prints back in the blind roller for another hour or more.
Not very scientific, but it works.