Guitstick, no you're wrong. We cannot both be right at the same time, NOT IN THIS CONTEXT.
You started this in a bewildered cry for help, apparently you had no idea why your caffenol didn't work.
You got a very prescise explanation to the matter, no talk about other things that MIGHT be wrong, but a prescise, to the point explanation.
You used the wrong vitamin c, but more importantly FAR too little of it, if you increased your dose 20, maybe forty times (I'm not intimately familiar witht that brand, but walked down that road with tabnlets with modest success on my first try), you would have had results.
I hereby will like to encourage you to try that out, exactly as I say, don't change anything except the ascorbine acid, and be damn ACCURATE, and increase your vitamin C juice 40 times from your first test, and report back!
You see, being sloppy is for ARTISTS, like for instance that great spanish painter Pablo Picasso, at the end of his life he was sloppy as hell, suceesful like noone else, and stinking rich and successful with the ladies to boot. At that time noone saw & remembered his early years, when he started out like everyone else and learned his craft. It was only after mastering the basics better than everyone, that he was able to let himself free and reach that level....
You (and I) are not there yet. We're learning, and when something goes wrong, its damn hard work to pinpoint what was the cause, if you changed everything, or did not know what you did in DETAIL, you would never learn anything.
The world is full of people that never mastered anything. The artists are few and far between. The Master artists are in a class of their own. I've never met any of those.
One example : Ezzie talked about different films needing different treatment. That is obvious, and very true when we talk about other developers. So far Caffenol has been very forgiving, and more or less enabled me to treat everything as if they where the same film. Ezzie is more particular than me, he is chasing that perfectly exposed, perfectly developed film, while I've entertained myself with rescueing long forgotten films thats been lying for close to 40 years or even more. But I'm also chasing the perfect developer - thats why I like to keep record and track about all the details, so I can IMPROVE.
I had one astonishing result : the first Kodak Advantix film I developed was a film found in a batch of unexposed films (€bay seller fooled me!). I put it in caffenol since the film was'nt important to me, and I wanted to test my modified tank for APS film : Developed in CC-M a little longer than usual, as I recall (have the data elsewhere), since this was from bottles previously mixed at 3X concentration and measured out 1/3 from each storage bottle. The storage bottles had been standing for some days and I suspected something had detoriated, so I gave it a few minutes longer than my standard 15 minutes @ 20 Centigrade. The negatives came out as color negatives! I have no explanation, I'm not complaining, but I'm desperate to repeat that! I have a hunch that will never happen.....since the next APS film came out exactly like all the Kodak Gold 200 I've developed, with a bog standard yellow mask and B&W.
So there you have it, there's no end of experiments and fun, even if you try to safeguard everything and be as accurate as you can!
Erik
