d76 borax or... carbonate

Donald Qualls · May 25, 2021

My point was that washing soda is sodium carbonate mono, plus a minuscule trace of added scent. Using it instead of technical grade sodium carbonate mono makes perfect sense -- using both in the same formula, not so much, and even if one is a substitute for the other (no notes to indicate that in the pasted formula), why different amounts?

narsuitus · May 25, 2021

koraks said:
So what is the pH of the resulting solution? The pH values listed don't make sense if you combine these different compounds. The only thing that's certain is that none of those values represents the actual pH of your solution. Have you run the numbers or done measurements on this?

I have no idea of the pH of the resulting solution. All I know is that I have been very happy with the performance of the 2-Bath Buffered Divided Developer.

narsuitus · May 25, 2021

Donald Qualls said:
My point was that washing soda is sodium carbonate mono, plus a minuscule trace of added scent. Using it instead of technical grade sodium carbonate mono makes perfect sense -- using both in the same formula, not so much, and even if one is a substitute for the other (no notes to indicate that in the pasted formula), why different amounts?

I am unable to answer your question, I have lost all my original notes on the formula and do not remember the reason (if there was one) for the different amounts.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · May 25, 2021

narsuitus said:
I use Borax and Sodium Carbonate in the following 2-Bath Buffered Divided Developer:

Bath A
1 liter Distilled Water 50 degree C
40 gm Sodium Sulfite (anhy) antioxidant preservative (pH 9.7)
12 gm Metol (Elon) low-contrast; soft-working developing agent
20 gm Hydroquinone high-contrast; hard-working developing agent
2 gm Potassium Bromide anti-fogging; restraining agent
12 gm Boric Acid acidic buffering agent; slows development (pH 5.5)
Distilled Water to make... 2 liters

Bath B
1 liter Distilled Water 32 degree C
40 gm Sodium Sulfite (anhy) antioxidant preservative (pH 9.7)
12 gm Borax alkaline activator (pH 9)
12 gm Washing Soda alkaline activator (pH 11)
4 gm Sodium Carbonate (mono) alkaline activator (pH 11)

Distilled Water to make... 2 liters

Compared to @gorbas' Bauman Diafine substitute which is also a MQ two bath developer, this developer has significantly higher amounts of both Metol and Hydroquinone. One wonders whether developer exhaustion happens at highlights to give a compensating effect in such developers.

Bauman Diafine
A
Metol-3g
Potassium metabisulfite-30g
Hydroquinone-7.5g
Sodium Carbonate 1.3g
KBr-2g
Water to 1L
B
Sodium Carbonate-100g
Sodium Sulphite-10g
KBr-2g
Water to 1L

relistan · May 25, 2021

Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
Compared to @gorbas' Bauman Diafine substitute which is also a MQ two bath developer, this developer has significantly higher amounts of both Metol and Hydroquinone. One wonders whether developer exhaustion happens at highlights to give a compensating effect in such developers.

Bauman Diafine
A
Metol-3g
Potassium metabisulfite-30g
Hydroquinone-7.5g
Sodium Carbonate 1.3g
KBr-2g
Water to 1L
B
Sodium Carbonate-100g
Sodium Sulphite-10g
KBr-2g
Water to 1L

As I mentioned earlier, I am pretty sure with those large amount of developing agents present in Narsuitus' developer, there will be carryover issues.

Don_ih · May 25, 2021

Donald Qualls said:
My point was that washing soda is sodium carbonate mono, plus a minuscule trace of added scent. Using it instead of technical grade sodium carbonate mono makes perfect sense -- using both in the same formula, not so much, and even if one is a substitute for the other (no notes to indicate that in the pasted formula), why different amounts?

I don't think it matters that much, since it's the second bath. It's going to aggressively activate the absorbed developing agents - which will do their work and lose their potency quickly. If it gives the results he likes, I guess it works for him.

Raghu Kuvempunagar · May 25, 2021

narsuitus said:
I use Borax and Sodium Carbonate in the following 2-Bath Buffered Divided Developer:

Bath A
1 liter Distilled Water 50 degree C
40 gm Sodium Sulfite (anhy) antioxidant preservative (pH 9.7)
12 gm Metol (Elon) low-contrast; soft-working developing agent
20 gm Hydroquinone high-contrast; hard-working developing agent
2 gm Potassium Bromide anti-fogging; restraining agent
12 gm Boric Acid acidic buffering agent; slows development (pH 5.5)
Distilled Water to make... 2 liters

Bath B
1 liter Distilled Water 32 degree C
40 gm Sodium Sulfite (anhy) antioxidant preservative (pH 9.7)
12 gm Borax alkaline activator (pH 9)
12 gm Washing Soda alkaline activator (pH 11)
4 gm Sodium Carbonate (mono) alkaline activator (pH 11)

Distilled Water to make... 2 liters

The use of Sodium Carbonate twice in this formula is odd as noted by @Donald Qualls and others. However, there is a possibility that this is not what the designer of the formula intended and could be a mistake that happened while copying notes or recollecting the formula from memory. Could it be that the original formula used Baking Soda instead of Washing Soda? 12g of Baking Soda and 4g of Sodium Carbonate would give a buffer with pH around the same ball park as Borax. A pH of 9-9.5 makes good sense for this formula as it has relatively high concentration of developing agents.

ruilourosa · May 26, 2021

An idea... Divided or split vestal d-76 and a carbonate second bath... Buffered or not... ???

Could it be? A feasible d-76c

No contractions or expansions... But a good to go 3+3 min dev ?

Raghu Kuvempunagar · May 26, 2021

ruilourosa said:
An idea... Divided or split vestal d-76 and a carbonate second bath... Buffered or not... ???

Could it be? A feasible d-76c

No contractions or expansions... But a good to go 3+3 min dev ?

It will no doubt develop film into negatives that can be scanned or printed. But why do you think it will give what you want? Of course you'll know only when you try it.

ruilourosa · May 26, 2021

I dont think but maybe this could be a way...

Lachlan Young · May 27, 2021

Ilfosol 3 would seem like a sensible choice to see if carbonate buffering really makes any significant difference to borate buffering other than in terms of potential visibility of granularity. There were likely several good reasons why Kodak didn't shift mainstream BW film developers to carbonate buffering historically, but they are largely less of an issue today.

ruilourosa · May 27, 2021

Is ilfosol 3 a known formula?

Raghu Kuvempunagar · May 27, 2021

ruilourosa said:
Is ilfosol 3 a known formula?

Not exactly. Nevertheless, MSDS can give some idea.

ruilourosa · May 28, 2021

Ilfosol 3
Pq carbonate Dev...
Could it be an acutol s or fx 15...

Phenidone os not usually known for adjacency effects...

I promissed myself i would not buy another commercial developer...

I wll try vestal d 76 divided with carbonate...

Lachlan Young · May 28, 2021

ruilourosa said:
Could it be an acutol s or fx 15...

Unlikely. A lot of Crawley's formulae are really still stuck in the mid-late 1950s - and he seems not to have been particularly privy to the rapid growth in understanding of the developer/ emulsion design relationship that had happened by the 1960s. Much more likely with Ilfosol 3 is that Ilford started from a carbonate/ bicarbonate buffer & adjusted P:Q ratios to give a desired level of superadditivity, with a suitable sulphite/ preservative level - and then possibly added small amounts of other silver solvents/ development accelerators/ restrainers to land at what was presumably a desired MTF sharpness/ RMS Granularity/ curve shape/ latitude relationship.

ruilourosa said:
Phenidone os not usually known for adjacency effects

Seems not to matter anything like as much as getting access to the iodide in the emulsion(s).

ruilourosa · May 29, 2021

Crawley states on several bjp anuals that emulsions are different from the ones before and proposes adjustments.
Some formulas are now probably old but he was groudbreaking in some formulas, maybe because he didn't had to deal with the comercial issues of the products...
FX 50 was an attempt to make a contemporary Dev.

He formulated Devs that would be hard to sell to a broad audience like fx-16

Ilford and kodak proposed directions looking forward to sell... A lot...

Raghu Kuvempunagar · May 29, 2021

ruilourosa said:
I wll try vestal d 76 divided with carbonate...

It will be interesting to compare divided D76 with Thornton's two bath developer.

Lachlan Young · May 29, 2021

ruilourosa said:
Crawley states on several bjp anuals that emulsions are different from the ones before and proposes adjustments.
Some formulas are now probably old but he was groudbreaking in some formulas, maybe because he didn't had to deal with the comercial issues of the products...
FX 50 was an attempt to make a contemporary Dev.

He formulated Devs that would be hard to sell to a broad audience like fx-16

Ilford and kodak proposed directions looking forward to sell... A lot...

Ilford/ Kodak/ Agfa etc had fundamental analytical equipment/ skills/ emulsion knowledge that Crawley didn't. Very often he's half right, but had been overtaken by rapid but confidential changes in emulsion technology - his use of desensitisers, iodide etc demonstrate that - as does the use of three developing agents in some formulae (which makes me wonder if he was seeing the effects of in-situ HQMS but was not able to work out what it was, or what it was doing). I'd also point out that Ilford was quite happy in the 1970s to take Crawley et al's money to make his formulae under contract, but according to comments some of their senior chemists made to Ian Grant at the time, they didn't think his formulae really had any advantages - and were sometimes questionable in their formulation choices/ reasoning. In other words, they'd looked to see if there was anything they could learn/ lift from them & found nothing.

FX-55 (despite not mentioning the Fenton Reaction anywhere - or doing anything about it) does offer up a framework for evolving into a decent developer based on carbonate/ bicarbonate buffering.

ruilourosa · May 29, 2021

dixactol? i do not have glycin

Lachlan Young · May 29, 2021

michael_r said:
Several years ago (when Ilfosol was the former Ilfosol S), Ilford used to have this chart:

View attachment 275794

I remember seeing that chart many years ago - though I don't think I read it in any detail at the time... It's very striking that by Ilford's assessment of their own range, ID-11 manages the granularity: sharpness relationship best with all the other developers as compromises. I also have a suspicion that Ilfosol is exploiting knowledge about how much sulphite you actually need (rather than the old 100g/l claims) to start having solvent/ byproduct/ iodide release effects on fine grain, single emulsion layer films. I think there's a time/ G-Bar plot for Ilfosol-S with FP4+ (in an 90s data sheet) which effectively suggests that at 1+9, Ilfosol was releasing so much restraining byproduct from the emulsion that it couldn't build a G-Bar higher than the low 0.7s (at least that's what it looks like it translates to), whereas at 1+14 it would merrily carry on gaining density. I further suspect that the effects the quantity of sulphite used in Ilfosol has on a single layer of blended emulsions doesn't continue linearly in multilayer constructions - which likely require a higher degree of solvency. A lot of the knowledge is probably still pretty confidential.

Tom Kershaw · May 30, 2021

Lachlan Young said:
I'd also point out that Ilford was quite happy in the 1970s to take Crawley et al's money to make his formulae under contract, but according to comments some of their senior chemists made to Ian Grant at the time, they didn't think his formulae really had any advantages - and were sometimes questionable in their formulation choices/ reasoning. In other words, they'd looked to see if there was anything they could learn/ lift from them & found nothing.

Lachlan,

Do you have any information on the popularity of the Crawley formulas and later Paterson developers - presumably made by ILFORD? - i.e. in market terms. Asking as by the time I got into photography early-mid 2000s although Rodinal was big, the other products I was generally aware of where the ILFORD and Kodak lines. Not so much Paterson, although I did see the products in catalogues and purchased a couple of FX-39 bottles.

Tom

ruilourosa · May 30, 2021

Vhs won beta in the market...

ruilourosa · May 30, 2021

Market is just the hability to sell more... It does not define other qualities on a product...

Lachlan Young · May 30, 2021

Tom Kershaw said:
Lachlan,

Do you have any information on the popularity of the Crawley formulas and later Paterson developers - presumably made by ILFORD? - i.e. in market terms. Asking as by the time I got into photography early-mid 2000s although Rodinal was big, the other products I was generally aware of where the ILFORD and Kodak lines. Not so much Paterson, although I did see the products in catalogues and purchased a couple of FX-39 bottles.

Tom

No idea - I think I used a bottle each of Acutol, Aculux 3(?) and FX-50 in about that early-mid 2000s era. Looking back, I don't recollect any being packaged in relatively large quantities relative to dilution (ie enough to make 5+ litres of working solution) other than Aculux - which suggests most of the market was the sector that played around with developers rather than produced work in sufficient quantity to actually make real qualitative judgements.

MattKing · May 30, 2021

ruilourosa said:
Market is just the hability to sell more... It does not define other qualities on a product...

Sometimes though the qualities that make a product more appealing to the market - things like ease of use, longevity, convenience in packaging - are equally or more important than the technical qualities.
As an example, Kodak's patent on the process that permits them to package D-76 in a single package, as compared to Ilford's need to package the otherwise nearly identical ID-11 in two packages.

d76 borax or... carbonate

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