Making iron gall ink from oak galls | Hacker News Reader

Making iron gall ink from oak galls

nyanpasu64.gitlab.io

93 pointsLorenDB38 comments

Huge trigger warning ahead: suicidal things.

I made oak gall ink once. My plan was to turn my own pen blank, make my own paper, and make my own ink.

To then write my suicide note before I did it. It seemed, I don't know, poetic?

The process of making the ink was so interesting that I got into making natural dyes and things. It sort of distracted me long enough to stop the suicidal thoughts.

Now I make tie dye shirts as a hobby when I feel dark!

I love that your suicide note gave you a reason to live. I make inks, paints, and dyes as part of insuring that sobriety is more satisfying than drinking beer.

I don't drink but as someone who does calligraphy as a hobby, I can attest to the calming effect that the smell of inks and paper, the sound of a nib scratching, the slightly embossed letters on paper after writing etc. have on ones state of mind. It's very relaxing and the outputs are very rewarding. Doubly so if you're in tech. This is almost the complete opposite.

Any advice for someone with a family member who is willing to go to rehab but continues to relapse over and over? He is an exceptionally smart guy, but he’s lost his fitness, job, hobbies, relationships and purpose.

The trick is not to try to quit substance use, but to build a life for oneself that's more satisfying without the substance. I started by building a woodworking workshop for myself and playing with shellac, wax, oil, and pigments for surface design. Then me and my drunk friends started making paper mache lampshades from egg cartons while we drank. That was important as it linked the old fun to the new fun so there was no opposition or tension. From there it was a matter of building momentum for the art play and allowing myself to meditate on the downsides of my beer drinking. Once I felt ready, I shut myself away for two months reading about sleeping most of the day, focusing on eating better, programming, playing video games, and sewing dog collars. The manual activities were important to put me in my body rather than anxious mind and my dog collars were so fabulous they all got stolen off the dogs. Then I examined sources of stress in my life, like my relationship with my parents, and I worked on those. Each stressor I dealt with gave me more freedom of movement and more confidence that I did indeed have the necessary agency.

Guilt is the number one killer of attempts to get sober. We addicts feel absolutely terrible about the effects of our behavior on other people. So we end up hating ourselves so much we often remove ourselves from the flow of life. From the outside the guilt manifests as anger, flailing, and destructive behavior. Christianity has good technologies for overcoming guilt. The whole "Jesus loves you more when you are at your worst, so give it over to Him" thing is very useful in these situations. I'm an atheist but see gods as deep aspects of the human mind that evolved for reasons, so seeing ritual and prayer as psych self-treatment is not an issue for me.

Relapses must be seen as part of the process, not opportunities to beat yourself up. In fact, willpower and discipline have absolutely no role in overcoming addiction. The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety, it's connection, thus addiction recovery is about reconnecting to life and people, not quitting substances. That's just a nice bonus.

I can still drink on occasion, maybe twice a year. It was important to me not to be one of those people who make alcohol an enemy. It's just a jealous God who needs to be bound so they know their place. All the best to your friend.

Does the family member want to quit using? If not, the only advice is to wait. If they do want to quit, my experience finds that 12 step programs work. I have another family member who started his abstinence through 12 step groups and now used church, family, community to stay clean. I would be glad to talk if you like.

That's beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Clarifying question; did you take a pen and make it blank, or did you turn a pen blank on a lathe? I gather it's the second, since the project was to have everything hand made.

Yeah so I never know how to say that without going into too much detail. I turned it from a blank into a pen.

Newton made his own iron gall ink according to a recipe found in his notes [0]. By using the same recipe you can sort of feel a connection to him...

Also, think about it when you hesitate to "reinvent the wheel" or "perform some work below my pay grade". The man actually fabricated his own ink for writing! If Sir Isaac himself could set aside time for this mundane part of his work, you certainly can. (Also, he polished his own lenses, an extremely arduous process; although there were many people in England at the time who were more skilled than him in glass polishing. He found that the very nature of polishing glass inspired him thoughts about the physics of light [1, chapter 1].)

[0] https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/225712-a-reci...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Lig...

That's like saying inventing TeX was mundane and beneath Donald Knuth, or that Dennis Ritchie shouldn't have spent so much time typing his thesis. The one thing all the greats have in common is a fanatical obsession with the presentation of their ideas. If you think it's beneath you, then that's because you haven't considered how important it is.

Iron is a powerful electron donor, in wooden ships (commonly made with oak components) this same phenomenon is called "nail sick" or "iron sickness" and is why brass and bronze are preferred to iron/steel/stainless steel hardware and fasteners.

It will also do this to wood on the outside of your house if it comes into contact with moisture. The wood looks burned around old nails, because the process is similar to what happens when the wood is actually on fire.

I've been repairing the old growth wood trim on my house from the 1930's and dutchman-ing the destroyed bits around fasteners with salvaged wood of a similar age.

I looked up electron donors in Wikipedia and apparently those serve as reducing agents. I was confused how it would oxidize wood, so I looked up 'iron-catalyzed oxidation' and found an article (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00351367) which claims oxidizing iron produces free radicals and hydrogen peroxide which subsequently eats the wood. I also came across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrous in my research....chemistry is complicated.

OIL RIG: oxidation is loss, reduction is gain (of electrons). So an electron donor would seem to facilitate reduction.

My chemistry-fu is very weak, though, so take with a pinch of NaCl.

LEO, "GER"! (Loss of Electrons is Oxidation, Gain of Electrons is Reduction)

For the same reason, if you use steel wool on oak it'll ruin it, as tiny pieces of the steel embed in the wood and react with it resulting in lots of small black spots.

look up fenton's reagent: iron(ii) will catalyze water into hydrogen peroxide. this also causes iron gall ink to damage paper over time

I see a lot of people recreating iron gall inks lately. There are many sellers on Etsy. It seems unwise to resurrect a corrosive ink that has eaten away so many manuscripts.

Walnut husk ink is a gorgeous and easy alternative. I get mine at S.F. Herbs by the pound, soak for at least a day or ferment in distilled water, and boil down until it's as dark as I like. Some borax or sodium benzoate can keep the surface from molding.

There are modern iron gall inks with better properties. E.g. Rohrer and Klingner Salix. Older inks had insanely low pH.

FWIW iron gall ink is still made and used in the present day. To be legally married in the UK you have to sign the marriage registry with iron gall ink. It's sold as "Registrar's Ink"

Notably Diamine’s Registrar Ink and Rohrer & Klingner’s Eisen-Gallus-Tinte inks are relatively easy brands of iron gall ink to acquire and the modern formulas are less harsh and useable in fountain pens.

They’re nice in that they’re naturally waterproof inks. They’re a bit on the dry side though in terms of flow.

Bizarre that I literally heard about this for the first time yesterday, as it’s mentioned in the excellent game Pentiment, which is about a scriptorium in a 16th century monastery (which is more interesting than it sounds!)

Thanks for sharing.

Information Technology used to be squishier.

imagine doing this when there was little notion of things like "pH" and "temperature control was literally a matter of feel.

I once had the romantic idea of making beer from a 200 year old recipe. Didn't get too far with it, but I recall one of the pieces of advice being not to let your horse stop walking while it's stomping the grain from the chaff, because it will urinate and ruin your ingredients. Also no mention of yeast - I guess you just took it on faith that fermentation would start if you kept it wet and warm.

I guess the horse maintained the yeast cultures

If you are using whole grains there is already natural yeast on it. Yeast is also pretty much everywhere. Nutrient rich solution left open will ferment. It just might not be a super powered brewing yeast.

Scandinavian brewers had a "magic stick" used to capture and store yeast until the next batch.

Brewing, like baking, was a regular occurrence in a household. It was done in the same place, with the same equipment, as last time. The yeast culture from the previous batch was likely a given ingredient.

Here's a video which goes through the entire process of making some. She goes pretty far into the historical accuracy by e.g. using rain water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9rbRRCBv8

It's on the long side but it's at least worth jumping to the end to see how the ink goes on as not at all black but quickly dries to jet.

I've handled victorian era letters (Letters to or from John Ruskin) and the way they decay around the ink is amazing. It's like picking up a post-modern paper cutout with goth black edging: the insides of the writing just .. went.

(this was decades ago, as a child, before archival concerns were brought to the fore. Don't handle old letters)

I think you can do something similar with black walnut shells/fruit (which is also good for fungal skin infections.)

I brought some home, intending to do this - and the squirrels got into them, heavily staining the deck.

Which is a good sign I guess!

I believe with black walnuts the juglone, which isn't present in oak galls, is responsible for much of the color. You should be careful with juglone. It can cause skin irritation. Apparently people do make ink from it.

I believe that juglone functions as a natural herbicide, reducing the competition from other trees.

Maybe it also has activity against fungi?

You can. You can also buy the active bits pre-extracted and ready to dissolve in water to use as a stain as Van Dyke crystals:

https://bolgers.co.uk/products/bolgers-walnut-crystals

No affiliation on that, they just happened to have a decent description of the product.

You may also be interested in Joumana Medlej's book "Wild Inks & Paints": https://majnouna.gumroad.com/l/wildinks?layout=profile.

"this handbook introduces you to the wonder of transforming natural matter into fully developed art supplies. Learn the basic chemistry behind colours and prepare inks, lakes, paints, pastes, binders, media and drawing tools from plants and materials foraged as the seasons turn, or already present in your kitchen cupboard."

I'm not very sure about the vinegar + steal wool part... that makes ferrous acetate pretty quickly, and what we want here is a ferro-gallate. I think there are ways of producing ferro-gallate inks without using sulfates, but historically ferrous sulfate was commonly used ( and leads to paper being eaten away over time )

That was just a quick experiment (not fully grounded in chemistry theory) to see what would happen, since my ferrous sulfate wasn't arriving until a day later.

It seems you can get oak gall powder if you're not up to the task of foraging and crushing the galls yourself

https://simplifier.neocities.org/irongall

I learned about this stuff from the Mark Hofmann forgeries + murders on Forensic Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hofmann

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