Two more furlough days down the tubes. I did succeed in devoting them to daguerreotypes, but didn’t make the progress I had hoped (what’s new?) :)

Today I had actually decided to take my first ever Becquerel D-Type but when I pulled out my small collection of plates, none of them really seemed to have an adequate level of polish. Call me Mr. Fussy, but I just don’t see the point of making a D-Type that you know from the get-go won’t be of the highest possible quality.

Sooooooo….. back to the tub of polishing supplies. I had a Mike Robinson clad plate that I had taken to a pretty high degree of polish in my last D-Type marathon, but it had what I can only refer to as “haze”. I hit it with the following:

A) 5 Min NuShine II S using the ROS with a foam pad and one of my new micro-fiber pad covers.
B) 5 Min 0.3 Micron Alumina Slurry (ROS & Etc)
C) 5 Min Dry red rouge
D) 5 Min Lampblack

Net result was a few places that seemed less hazy,  but overall not much improvement. I thought about starting over, but I seem to have trouble in the coarser end of the polishing compound spectrum. I have a tendency to chew through the silver clad layer before I know it.

I was getting annoyed, and when I get annoyed I usually get stubborn.

I knew that even very fine grit will polish metal if you give it long enough. I decided to just hit the plate with dry rouge for as long as it took to get to a perfect polish.

It takes about three hours and fifteen minutes.

Polished Plate - The hard way

The big milestone is that I was satisfied for the first time ever with my level of polish. I also learned a few things. I discovered that clad plates can have little pinhole defects in them. I had read about that, but now know what it looks like. I also learned a lot about keeping my polishing area free of contaminants – to prevent those maddening “squiggles” that I was getting from time-to-time.

I also know that I can make a perfect looking plate (I had been beginning to wonder). It isn’t a viable polishing method for the long term. I probably had more than an hour in the plate from the first effort bringing my time investment to 4 or 5 hours for one sixth plate. I hope I get to where I can be more efficient than that. I knew D-Types weren’t Polaroids, but good grief!

Any way, more experiments ahead. Today didn’t turn out to be D-Day (the sun went away behind a wall of fog) but I am getting closer. I guess I will have to admit that I am pretty stubborn. I have at least three different polishing “instruction sets” but I continue to be convinced that I can invent a better one on my own.

Speaking of stubborn, yesterday I continued my experiments with making mirrored glass as a potential daguerreotype substrate. In spite of published accounts of failures, I still want to see if I can make it work. The twin sirens of “less polishing” and “cheaper plates” continues to draw me on.

If you would like to read/see more, go to to my lab notes or the image gallery.

Hopefully stubbornness will turn out to be a good quality in a daguerreotypist.

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