The other day you asked a good question about silicate size, but nobody had any answers. So I've been doing some reading... Here's some of what I've been finding.
Silicates can be measured down to single digit nanometers, (0.000,000,000,1 of a meter) so WAAAAAY finer than any of our compounds. (The Ebola virus is 200 nanometers) Generally, silicates are roughly the thickness of human cell membranes. By the same token, they can be measured UP to a micron in certain chemical configurations, but as congomerates rather than free silicates which is what the 'Russian' process creates in leather. I can't find anything that tells me the specific size found in leather but I'm guessing it varies heavily depending upon what the animal was feeding on. Still in the low, perhaps double digit nanometers.
This next paragraph gave me a much clearer idea of just how small silicates can be;
"Think about fossil dinosaur bones. We have never actually found a bone. What are found are stones that are exactly what the bones looked like. (Think 'petrified wood,' once wood, now stone. Same thing happened to dinosaur bones.) When the original bone was buried, water containing silicates seeped into it, and ever so slowly the silicates were deposited within the bone. Over time, the bony structure dissolved and was completely replaced by the stone, in such minute detail that from the appearance of the stone we can today deduce with total accuracy even the cell structure of the original bone, and can indeed diagnose what diseased the bone may have suffered."
So it seems to me (and this is just hypothosis) that when using good quality leather (which would come from well cared for animals and tanned properly) we ought to have an extremely fine grained polishing agent, which would work well for a final step in the stropping sequence. I wouldn't want to use it to profile D2.
Stitchawl
Silicates can be measured down to single digit nanometers, (0.000,000,000,1 of a meter) so WAAAAAY finer than any of our compounds. (The Ebola virus is 200 nanometers) Generally, silicates are roughly the thickness of human cell membranes. By the same token, they can be measured UP to a micron in certain chemical configurations, but as congomerates rather than free silicates which is what the 'Russian' process creates in leather. I can't find anything that tells me the specific size found in leather but I'm guessing it varies heavily depending upon what the animal was feeding on. Still in the low, perhaps double digit nanometers.
This next paragraph gave me a much clearer idea of just how small silicates can be;
"Think about fossil dinosaur bones. We have never actually found a bone. What are found are stones that are exactly what the bones looked like. (Think 'petrified wood,' once wood, now stone. Same thing happened to dinosaur bones.) When the original bone was buried, water containing silicates seeped into it, and ever so slowly the silicates were deposited within the bone. Over time, the bony structure dissolved and was completely replaced by the stone, in such minute detail that from the appearance of the stone we can today deduce with total accuracy even the cell structure of the original bone, and can indeed diagnose what diseased the bone may have suffered."
So it seems to me (and this is just hypothosis) that when using good quality leather (which would come from well cared for animals and tanned properly) we ought to have an extremely fine grained polishing agent, which would work well for a final step in the stropping sequence. I wouldn't want to use it to profile D2.
Stitchawl
