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  #11  
Old 8th March 2020, 08:49 PM
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Martin Aislabie Martin Aislabie is offline
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I use one of these - https://shop.silverprint.co.uk/Kinet...KE0440/SW-100/

Martin
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  #12  
Old 9th March 2020, 08:59 AM
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Quote:
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Me too .
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  #13  
Old 9th March 2020, 11:07 AM
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What makes the brush antistatic other than it being made of natural fibres?
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  #14  
Old 9th March 2020, 12:56 PM
Terry S Terry S is offline
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I have a similar brush to others that have been linked to, but I have never given it much thought about how efficient they are.

As usual google gives many explanations, but this simple and quick to view video makes me wonder once more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuWPwFFYUtY

After watching the above, I'm tempted to get out one of my LP's and use my photo brush on it, to do the same test above...

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  #15  
Old 9th March 2020, 06:02 PM
Martin Rick Martin Rick is offline
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What makes the brush antistatic other than it being made of natural fibres?
My hair is made of natural fibres (for the time being at least) and is very susceptible to static
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  #16  
Old 9th March 2020, 06:46 PM
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If you use a zeroes tat gun on any brush natural or synthetic will it make the brush into an antistatic brush? Think I will stick to using my lens brush and Rocket blower.
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  #17  
Old 9th March 2020, 10:31 PM
Nat Polton Nat Polton is offline
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I have one of the original Zerostats. Cost a fortune back in the day.
I never really knew if it was working or just my imagination.
I have just tried it on some fine wool fibres plucked from a scarf. It blows the dust off better than I remembered.
I still have a blower in regular use.
One thing I remember about the Zerostat was the instructions said to squeeze the trigger slowly and release slowly, not a sharp action, as the gun worked better with the slower trigger movement.
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  #18  
Old 10th March 2020, 01:12 AM
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I looked at this some time ago and found a couple of general factors that made me not want to buy an "anti-static" brush...

You cannot remove static by earthing the object (very annoying this one). The reason is that the static charge is on an insulator and so cannot flow anywhere (it's called "static" for a reason!).

The simplest way to neutralise the charge seems to be to use an ioniser that generates both positive and negative ions. These are used in the printing industry (and probably by Ilford/Harman etc now I think of it) on their printing webs. Plastic usually charges up with a negative charge (an excess of electrons) so the negative ions from the ioniser are repelled and the positive ones are attracted to the film, neutralising the negative charge. The snag here is that as far as I could tell at the time (and a quick check seems to confirm this is still the case) real ionisers that use a very high voltage and spikes to generate ions are no longer made. The only ones I can find use radioactive materials that decay to generate negative ions (which are both dangerous when real, but mostly fake anyway). I'll keep looking for an old one and see it it does work in practice.

One other way is to make the film conductive, preventing any static charge from forming in the first place, or enabling it to be earthed and the charge removed that way, but that means coating the film with a chemical, which is probably not a good idea...

So... I'm not seeing how the "anti-static" brushes can actually work, other than as a brush to wipe the dust away.

Last edited by Bob; 10th March 2020 at 01:34 AM.
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  #19  
Old 10th March 2020, 01:57 PM
Nat Polton Nat Polton is offline
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Bob's article has just reminded me, we had a device about the size of a small electric fan heater. It was sold to get rid of tobacco smoke in the home.
It actually worked. Instead of looking at the television through a cloud of smoke it did actually remove the smoke.
I can only assume the smoke particles fell to the floor. Didn't get rid of the stink though.
I must have a look and see if they are still made.
It would be an ideal accessory to keep dust down in a darkroom.
It was sold as an ioniser to get rid of pollen and tobacco smoke.
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  #20  
Old 10th March 2020, 04:20 PM
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Yeah Nat, that sounds like an old-skool ioniser - you can spot them in use because there is usually a lot of dust collecting just in front of them. If you check ebay etc now they are full of "air purifiers" that have "ioniser/ionizer" in the title but do not in fact contain an ioniser - which is really annoying.
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