I've been crawling around darkrooms since the mid 70's and I still manage to suprise myself.
I made a batch of pyro-uno. I had just over 100ml of TEA left, so why not. It was the PF tea, so I cooked it at 250F for a half hour to get all the water out. Allowed it to cool to 150ish and then mixed in the ingredients. I let it cool to room temp before I tried to use it. A slight golden colour. All looked good.
I rolled a 36 expose of Nepan 400 and shot 36 identical exposures in my back yard. I spooled 1/2 the roll in the tank and put the remainder of the roll in the canister....for later, if needed. I developed the recommended 1:100 and took a stab at a development time of 8 mins, on a rotary drum. develop-runce-fix-rinse. The film was thin but suprisingly good results from my non-optical-enlarger.
I then put the remander of the roll in the tank and tried a development of 12 mins. This time all I got was a blank strip, as if I just fixed it. I'm not imune to blunders, so I just went out and shot another roll. Same result again.....except there was an ultra faint image, but no sign of any black leaders (35mm) for edge markings. The developer still looks golden and when I dumped the developer out of the tank, it was the typical root-beer colour one would expect.
I shot the same scene, same settings on another roll and developed it with my usual developer. Good development, as expected.
The seringe I used never touched water and I used the same one for all attempts.
I don't know what the PH should have been, but after I write this I am going to measure what it is now. Pehaps someone with some working developer could measure theirs to compare.
Any ideas?