DRY MOUNTING

Depending on the size of your print and what you’re planning to do with it, it may be important to have us mount the print for you. We offer a number of mounting options, and a number of materials to choose from.

The most common type of mounting we do is dry mounting. For this type of mount, we use special presses (both vacuum and roller) to adhere your print onto a backing board. This ensures that your print stays flat, for example if you’re framing it and want to make sure the paper doesn’t curl under the glass. The backing board also protects the print to a greater or lesser degree against damage such as edge dings, creases, tears and punctures.

There are several types of backing board materials that we deal with regularly. These include

• mat boards (including Rising cotton rag boards),
• foam core (including Gilman Brothers MountCor and MountCor Canvas),
• Sintra,
• acrylic/plexiglass,
• aluminum composite sheet (including Dibond),
• and aluminum.

For mounting adhesives, we use foam boards that are pre-treated with a conservation grade adhesive (such as with MountCor foam core boards). For other types of boards we use separate adhesive films, including Drytac Facemount, which is engineered to be an optically clear, long-term mounting film.

Mounting boards have different trade-offs. Key qualities include thickness, weight, dimensional stability, puncture-resistance and cost. A choice like foam core, is cost effective and light. It’s great for many common uses including framing; but foam core isn’t necessarily dimensionally stable over a long time. Larger pieces on foam core may bow or flex in different ways under the influence of heat, humidity or other environmental change. A material like Sintra, which is a closed-cell PVC sheet, is medium in weight cost, and comes in different thickness. It’s much harder to puncture than foam core, and so protects the print much better. But it also may flex because it’s not rigid. Acrylic is similar in its qualities, but instead of being solid white or black, the sheet is transparent. Like Sintra, acrylic will flex.

If you need a backing material that is dimensionally stable over the long term, choices include solid aluminum sheets, and aluminum composite materials (ACM) like Dibond. ACM sheets are two very thin aluminum layers which a thicker layer of plastic in between. ACM is lighter and lower cost than pure aluminum sheets, and both are very rigid. This is considered the “gold standard” of mounting options, but the quality come at a higher cost.

Each material is a quality choice for what it does, and we don’t use any materials that would impact your prints in a significantly negative way, such as through a chemical reaction to acids or glues. But a key consideration is that once we dry mount your print using the above approaches, it would no longer be considered “archival” under the strictest sense. We do have some archival mounting approaches that we can use to ensure the highest standard of longevity for your print.

If you’re highly concerned about archival options, need a different specific material for your project, or simply would like a different type of mount for visual reasons, ask us for options. We may have other materials or mounting approaches that we can recommend, and we can guide you through the choices.