Dear Dave,
 
How do you do the actual drying? I remember reading that you start with drying the prints on air for a while, then drying the prints until they are really dry in cardboards. Is that how you do it?
 
Kind regards--

Yes, that's the procedure I use. But I know nobody else who does it that way ...

On the plus side - the prints (back to back in pairs between the boards) come out exactly flat, and the drying boards also stay very flat, so that they can be used again and again with no problem. When wet prints are put straight into the boards, the boards inevitably become warped, and it is very difficult to get them flat again for the next time.

The boards themselves need to be dried out, and I place them outdoors in a rack edge-on to the sunlight, so that they don't warp so much as they dry ...

The negative side of doing it this way is that one must be very careful about damaging the prints. It also needs lots of space (which I don't have) and the process takes quite a bit of time. (I usually combine it with deskwork, and switch back and forth between the two jobs as the day goes on ...)

Dave

Dear Dave,

thank you very much for your helpful information.

I spent one whole day on drying. Out of the sheets, back into the sheets... finally I had some almost perfectly flat prints, and some still having waves.

To sum up my experience: it is probably very important to avoid that the paper dries partially during printing, as I guess, this results in waves which won't go away (waves in the unprinted area, sometimes on paper edges in the printed areas too, even while using good Japanese ink and well-prepared nori). But I also had one paper which I soaked but did not print on, even this got small waves on the two long edges after drying. I don't know why.

If you have any additional ideas on the emergence of buckles I would appreciate it a lot. Anyway I thank you for your help and wish you a happy Sunday.

Kind regards--

Well, I'm really not sure that I can add anything else to what I wrote the other day ... long sheets just are very difficult ...

Maybe re-wet after drying once, and see if it behaves better the second time?

Dave

Your description of drying prints is very similar to the way I was taught to dry etchings. So maybe no one does it that way in Japan but we do something very similar in the US.
But instead of laying the prints directly on the cardboard which causes the cardboard to warp. Layer the prints between cotton linters. Cotton linters are a part of western paper making process and they are simply heavy absorbent cotton sheets. As the linters get wet change them out with dry ones. The corrugation in the cardboard keeps the air flowing and if you change out the cotton linters the cardboard will never get wet and never warp and you will have dry flat prints. At college we also had a fan and straps and weights but a heavy thing on top will do the trick. Because Japanese papers are so much thinner than the western etching paper you probably only need to change out the linters once.