There will be many responses, I'm sure, to the recent laments about
fragile player rolls.  Our archival paper folks have posted comments
before on the subject.

More years ago than I like to admit, Harold Powell asked me if I could
salvage some old Ampico sub-masters that had become too brittle to use.
The sub-masters were made on the cheapest of paper, since they were
intended to be used for a relatively short time and then replaced with
another sub-master when the first one got tired.

Powell had the masters for most of the rolls, but in some cases all he
had were the sub-masters.  I played with various methods of stabilizing
the paper, some of which horrify me now.  The one that worked well
enough for Powell to use was to saturate the paper with a commercial
hair spray, which both made the paper more flexible and held it
together.  How long the "fix" would last wasn't an issue at the time,
since all he wanted to do was to make new masters from the sub-masters.

Don't blame or flame me for this -- it all happened back in the days
when most people didn't care whether a roll lived or not, and sometimes
burned them in fireplaces for the cheery blaze they made.  I even
repaired rolls with Scotch tape then.  Eventually I saw the light and
now preach the salvation of all rolls.

Bob Billings

 [ Maybe it's a surfactant (wetting agent) that helps relieve the
 [ brittleness, and the lacquer helps hold it together.  I'll try
 [ hair spray on the remaining paper fragments.  -- Robbie