Badger Brushes: Soaking for more than 30 seconds?

Recently, I've seen a few posts that suggest that there isn't a significant difference in the amount of time a Badger is exposed to water. Basically, that each of these are equivalent:

• A quick wetting (running the badger underneath a stream of water for up to 30 seconds)
• A short soaking (10 seconds)
• A long soaking (more than 2 minutes)

So, I pulled out my food scale and measured the weight of three different brushes at different points in the soaking cycle. It should be noted that I did not measure the "quick wetting" approach since my badgers shrugged off nearly all the water. The method used was:

1. Weigh the brush dry
2. Soak the brush in warm water, with 2/3rds of the bristles covered in water. (NO agitation at all)
3. Pull the brush straight up and allow to drip for exactly 3 seconds
4. Transfer to tray and weigh
5. Perform measurements at: 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 to 25 minutes or until weight stabilizes
6. For fun - after the test concludes for each brush, measure weight after 10 hard shakes (no wringing out)

The brushes used were:

Satin Tip "the purest" - 22mm knot synthetic. Control: since synthetics will saturate & stabilize quickly.
Parker Pure Badger - 24mm knot, 56mm loft.
Thäter three band silvertip - 49125/3 28mm knot, 56mm loft
*American Weigh Scale - AMW-SC-2KG measures to .1gram

The results were interesting, and varied. Some basic observations:

- The Synthetic trapped 22g of water in the first 10 seconds, and stabilized at 64g @30seconds
- The Parker pure badger trapped water at the slowest rate - taking a full 25 minutes to get to 146g
- The dense Thäter saturated within two minutes, but could be reasonably be considered saturated within one minute.

- The Synthetic was the only brush to reasonably saturate within 10 seconds
- The Synthetic trapped nearly as much water (24g in 30 seconds) as the Parker Pure (25g in 25 minutes)
- The dense silvertipped Thäter trapped the most water (52g in 2 minutes)

- The synthetic dried nearly completely with a "10 vigorous shake" dry (within 1g of dry weight)
- The less dense Parker badger released most of it's trapped water after a vigorous shake dry (within 2g of dry weight)
- The more dense Thäter held the most water after a vigorous shake dry (7g from it's dry weight)

It'd be interesting to see additional tests with different manufacturers and density levels, as well as getting a boar brush in the mix so that we can understand just how much water those absorb. It might be possible to get the brushes to trap water faster if the soak-cycle included agitation, which may explain why some people feel their badgers are sufficiently saturated quicker.

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Badger Brushes: Soaking for more than 30 seconds?