Alex and Megan have been playing with pipetting arrays of solutions onto the FTO as described in the "Another Printing Option" thread. Megan said that the 5µL and 10 µL drops seem to be taking a long time to dry even in a 60˚ oven. Then it occurred to me...we have been using the metal nitrate solutions made up in the ink base (mostly because that is what we have already made up). If we are not printing, perhaps it would be better to just use aqueous solutions, appropriately acidified?

I realize that the results may not be comparable then to the films printed with the printer, but right now, our printer is not looking too promising (the latest is we can't get it to power up...hoping it just needs some time to dry out after all the unclogging procedures). And as we have only gotten one film to print, imperfectly, we don't even have much to compare to!

And one benefit of abandoning the need for the ink base would be using precursor solutions that one would otherwise be leery of putting through the printer.

Any thoughts on this? Those of you who are trying the pipetting array method, are you using the ink base solutions as well or did you already beat me to the punch?

Cheers,
Maggie