Diy Dextrin - First Attempt

[Rednaxela]

This is my first attempt at making dextrin from corn starch.

 

 

I wanted to use this for making one of my (Lamy) FP inks a bit more dip pen friendly. Gum arabic is the go-to binder for this, but for some reason I like the idea of making and using dextrin better. However the powder I ended up with left me with a couple of questions.

 

To see what would happen if I added it to the ink, I first added it to a little bit of water. It immediately formed little clumps that would not dissolve by shaking or stirring, only by crushing. Is this normal? Somehow I had expected it to behave more like sugar in this regard.

 

Also, the colour of the solution looks pretty dark to me, and I find it hard to call the dry powder 'golden or canary-yellow'. On the other hand, online images do exist of dextrin with more or less the colour of what I made.

 

This is what it looks like when dissolved in water.

 

 

 

Just a tiny bit cloudy to my eye, but no sediments. Is this indeed what it should look like?

 

All in all I wonder if this is really what I want to put into my FP ink. Anyone who has experience with home-making dextrin? Am I on the right track? Would be most interested in your thoughts!

[amberleadavis]

I look forward to hearing what people say. I think this is darn cool.

[Rednaxela]

So I've cooked myself some aqua destillata, and mixed it in an egg cup with quite a bit of the powder while the water was still hot. Reheated the mixture in the microwave to speed up the dissolving of the last tiny clumps. I now have a clear, dark and sirupy solution with a slightly burnt smell. When I let it run off a spoon it looks like it can be used as a binder indeed, though it might be a bit on the thin side still. Anyway, we'll see.

 

 

The plan is to fill the small Gimborn bottle with Lamy Black, and then add the dextrin solution drop by drop, having test writing sessions in between to see how it all works out.

 

I will report back.

[amberleadavis]

Where did you find Gimborn bottles?

[Rednaxela]

This one was donated to me by a coworker. It was filled with old indian ink which had deteriorated and become unusable over time. The bottle seems too small to use for dipping with an oblique holder, but it has this nice little eyedropper-like tube to the lid that looks like it's meant for loading ink onto the pen. I'll find out today if this is the case indeed.

 

 

 

 

Edit: an -> and.

Edited June 9, 2016 by Rednaxela

[Rednaxela]

Finished experimenting for today.

 

The eyedropper thing works brilliantly. I just paint the concave side of the nib with ink and off I go. Very clean and controlled. This technique is certainly a keeper.

 

With regards to the dextrin, five to ten drops seems to do the trick. It makes the ink stick better to the pen, while not decreasing its free-flowing quality too much. Flooding the ink with the solution seems to make it too thick and heavy resulting in an uneven flow (again) and an inability to write fine lines. I must add though that I'm not experienced enough to have a very clear view on what to look for in a dip pen ink, so please take these observations with a grain of salt. Also, any advice re. this would be greatly appreciated.

 

Hope this is of help to anyone.

[Rednaxela]

When writing with my Lamy/dextrin mixture I noticed something quite annoying. It is visible in the bottom line of this picture.

 

 

It consistently blots at the turn of an upward loop such as in the small 'e'.

 

The upper two lines were written with Talens Indian ink, to see if it was a writing technique issue. It doesn't look like it is, though my technique is far from perfect. With the Indian ink the micro ink flow is a lot more consistent and I can make much sharper turns without the blots. For reference, the baselines in the picture are 1cm apart, so the x-height is a couple of millimeters, which is my regular writing size. Paper used is 50gsm Clairefontaine Smart Print Paper, and the nib is a vintage Perry 120 EF.

 

To see if this meant the ink was still too runny overall, I made a new, much thicker dextrin solution, with half an egg cup of boiling water and four teaspoons of powder. Then I started with a big drop of this honey-like solution and gradually added ink until it started to actually write when on the nib. This got me an almost paint-like ink, which behaved reasonably well, except with regards to the issue that I wanted to solve.

 

Frankly, in this state the ink is pretty much unusable for me, as it doesn't enable me to properly practice writing with a dip pen. Also, I'm not sure if this is caused by adding the dextrin in the first place. The plain Lamy ink seems to show it too, albeit to a lesser extent.

 

Is this a surface tension issue? Perhaps the tip of the pen is dragging too much of the already written ink along at the turn. Or is it something else I'm missing?

[Rednaxela]

So I thought: surface tension -> ox gall. Not sure if ox gall and ox gall soap are the same thing, but I do have a piece of the latter, so I scraped off a pinch and mixed it with half an egg cup of boiling water. Dropped some of the solution into the still paint-like ink, and started writing. Horrible. It had completely lost the ability to write thin lines.

 

After all this messing around I started to wonder what is was that I wanted to solve about the original ink in the first place. So I cleaned out the bottle and started anew with a fresh batch of plain Lamy Black. Wrote some text with it, and recalled that it wrote a bit dry, and ran out of steam a bit too soon for my liking. Hairlines on the other hand were actually pretty fine, certainly fine enough for my needs, as long as I didn't overload the nib. The dryness showed up when for instance writing a large capital H, where the ink would not make it to the end of the final flourish.

 

There was another interesting thing I noticed. On the concave side of the nib, the drop of plain ink would gather just above the tip. I'm not sure if this is specific to this Perry nib, but it looks like this ink would only run to the tip through the slit and not any other way, and this might be what makes for the clean and fine lines. Perhaps this was missing from the paint-like ink and what was causing the microblotting, I don't know.

 

So a little bit wetter without loosing the ability to gather above the tip seemed to be the objective. Put in a tiny drop of ox gall soap solution, et voilà.

 

 

I must say I feel a little bit silly, as it all started out with a wish to add a binder. Dextrin might be a good alternative for gum arabic indeed, but I'm not so sure anymore if a binder is what I need myself for the writing I'm after. General consensus seems to be that one needs thin ink for fine hairlines, and enough viscosity to do the thicker shades. This Perry nib is not overly flexible, but in any case the ink keeps up very well when the tines are being spread. Maybe with a more flexible nib the binder will come in again. We'll see.

 

Thanks for keeping up with this totally unscientific experimenting of mine. Hopefully there is something in it for some of you, but please take everything for what it is worth, which may not be all that much. Also, I'd be most interested in your comments, so please share your thoughts!

[amberleadavis]

Alexander, thank you for sharing your experience. Remember that experiments that yield useful information are in fact successful experiments. I think you learned a lot.