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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Mirror recoating
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2019 Mar 26, 19:02 +0000
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2019 Mar 26, 19:02 +0000
You can experiment even without removing the old coating. An alternative to silvering the back surface, is to make it black. So that it does not participate in forming the image at all. Removing silvering and making it black is much easier than silver/aluminium coating. Just try, and see what happens with your glasses in their present state. What you will see depends on the state of the remaining silvering. You may see two reflections, but I expect it will be easy to tell which is which. They will be of different brightness. Alex. P.S. I can find an old recipe for "silvering" sextant mirrors with mercury, if you are interested. (Mercury is considered nowadays a dangerous substance to work with). A supply of mercury was usually available for use in an artificial horizon in old times. When I was a boy, I silvered things with real silver, using the spent solutions from photo film/prints development. (In those times we all developed our films ourselves, using a chemical process, and I byproduct of this process was a solution which contained enough silver.) A.