~40 Year Old HC-110 and Rodinal-use or toss?

mshchem · Jan 19, 2025

MattKing said:
You are, of course, correct.
There are 8 pints to the gallon, not 16.
So the correct answer is 4 US gallons of dilution B, not 2.
And now I'll take slightly unfair advantage of my moderator powers and edit my initial post to make it less ridiculous!

OMG all these years I've believed it made 3.5 gallons. I think I'm going nuts from my teenage exposure to CP-5 Formalin fixer. That combined with the (then) legal drinking age of 18.

F4U · Jan 20, 2025

"All these years". Actually the things we make last a lot longer than our frighteningly short lives. Try it and use it up if it works. We're not museum curators. And in the year 60025, that bottle of developer will possibly end up being found in an archeology dig. But I doubt it. God will have likely figured out dinosaurs were a better idea than us, and will have replaced us with them.

MattKing · Jan 20, 2025

F4U said:
"All these years". Actually the things we make last a lot longer than our frighteningly short lives. Try it and use it up if it works. We're not museum curators. And in the year 60025, that bottle of developer will possibly end up being found in an archeology dig. But I doubt it. God will have likely figured out dinosaurs were a better idea than us, and will have replaced us with them.

Those bottles don't last that long, even if their contents might be capable of that longevity, I certainly have had to deal with HC-110 in bottles that have failed and started to leak.
It is important to remember that Kodak designed HC-110 to have excellent shelf life, but not shelf life measured in decades.

Ben Hutcherson · Jan 20, 2025

Well, my initial results with the HC110 say-it's(mostly) dead.

I got adventurous and actually loaded up 4 sheets of film, intending to test the Rodinal also, and compare all tests to D76.

Unfortunately, in a moment of stupidity, I didn't realize my bellows were loose on my monorail camera(I have not used this camera much), so managed to completely fog two sheets of film. Still, though, I figured they could be a valuable test all of their own.

I first developed one of the properly exposed sheets and one of the fogged sheets in Dilution B @20ºC for 9 minutes(massive dev chart time) with my relatively fresh D76(16mL to a total volume of 500mL for my SP445 tank). Without scanning or doing a ton of analysis, this looks like at least a respectable negative to me, and the fogged one(not shown) showed respectable density. I'll throw it on the densitometer later and see what these actually are.

I did the old bottle of HC110 exactly the same way, and this was the result

There's the faintest trace of an image on the right, but nothing usable. The fogged one on the left shows very little density compared to the fogged one in fresh(er) develoepr.

So, I guess it's not COMPLETELY dead, but it's definitely nowhere near as active as you could expect HC110 to be, and as far as I'm concerned not usable.

Don_ih · Jan 20, 2025

Ben Hutcherson said:
I guess it's not COMPLETELY dead

That is exactly the result I got testing a similarly old bottle. It's good you didn't sell it untested.

Augustus Caesar · Jan 20, 2025

Ben Hutcherson said:
Well, my initial results with the HC110 say-it's(mostly) dead.

I got adventurous and actually loaded up 4 sheets of film, intending to test the Rodinal also, and compare all tests to D76.

Unfortunately, in a moment of stupidity, I didn't realize my bellows were loose on my monorail camera(I have not used this camera much), so managed to completely fog two sheets of film. Still, though, I figured they could be a valuable test all of their own.

I first developed one of the properly exposed sheets and one of the fogged sheets in Dilution B @20ºC for 9 minutes(massive dev chart time) with my relatively fresh D76(16mL to a total volume of 500mL for my SP445 tank). Without scanning or doing a ton of analysis, this looks like at least a respectable negative to me, and the fogged one(not shown) showed respectable density. I'll throw it on the densitometer later and see what these actually are.

View attachment 388473

I did the old bottle of HC110 exactly the same way, and this was the result

View attachment 388474

There's the faintest trace of an image on the right, but nothing usable. The fogged one on the left shows very little density compared to the fogged one in fresh(er) develoepr.

So, I guess it's not COMPLETELY dead, but it's definitely nowhere near as active as you could expect HC110 to be, and as far as I'm concerned not usable.

See! I told ya so!

lamerko · Jan 21, 2025

Several different batches of ORWO R-09 from the 80s work great. In fact, there are a few people who hunt down leftover R-09 and work with it - they claim it's better than the current modern formulas. Since it's not my type of developer, I only tested my stock to see if it was alive and gave it away. So there's a good chance that Rodinal is OK.

Ben Hutcherson · Jan 21, 2025

Well, this test begs a repeat.

Not that I'm hoping for any different results, but I still have to satisfy my curiosity.

Did I mention that I hadn't shot sheet film in about 5 years? For some reason I had the notch orientation backwards so these were shot through the base.

I also loaded the SP445 tank backwards with emulsion in. I noticed that when really looking at the "good" negative and realized there was a wide undeveloped patch in the center.

Will it make that much difference? I doubt it, but shooting backwards is certainly going to decrease density, and developing backwards in the hangers is also going to seriously starve the film of developer. Since the old stuff showed some activity, it makes me want to retest it(and I still need to test the rodinol).

Don_ih · Jan 21, 2025

That's why it's good to use a strip of 35mm to test developer.

As for the notch, it's at the top, right?

~40 Year Old HC-110 and Rodinal-use or toss?

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