Darkroom Progress - Now building my Processing/Wet station

mshchem said:

I absolutely recommend a pre rinse with copious amounts of water at your processing temperature, drain well before you add the developer. I've always done this since c 1973. This gets everything up to the same start temperature every time.

If you start to get staining use stop bath. You can use Kodak indicator stop, the bromocresol purple indicator in the stop doesn't stain the print.

Final rinse or stabilizer isn't required with a good final wash in a tray away from the tube for 1 minute.

Tubes get old fast if you have to wash and dry during a session.

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Is washing the tanks just a good rinse or is there a solution and scrub you should use? I keep hearing people echo this about the washing and drying. I’m hoping I can find a way to make this less of an issue. I’m hoping that just owning multiple tanks that can give me a stretch of 4 or 5 prints before I need to wash and dry will help alleviate some of that jam up. I have 2 of my 11x14 drums coming, I’m thinking I get a hand full of jobo 2820 test drums which do 4x5 prints. Then I could do 4 or 5 test prints to dial in the print and then I have 2 11x14 drums that I can hopefully get the final print looking good. Then do a full wash and dry of my 4-5 test drums and the 2 11x14 drums. Then move onto the next image.

I've never used soap etc. Just blast out with some hot water. Tar stains, from my experience is leaving things sit and developer decomposing. Of course if you have crud, wash it good with unscented soap and hot water.

Nice work, should be fun when it's all done.

arespencer said:

Is it best/recommended to do a stop bath in this process with drums?

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Yes, I'd recommend it, both for evenness of processing and keeping your blix in good condition. It matters less if you use the blix one shot (but why would you do that).

arespencer said:

Is washing the tanks just a good rinse

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Yes; you need to ensure you've got any remaining drops of blix or-blix-contaminated water out. That's the main thing.

koraks said:

Yes, I'd recommend it, both for evenness of processing and keeping your blix in good condition. It matters less if you use the blix one shot (but why would you do that).

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Ok good to know. What stop bath chemicals do I buy? I think I’m going to use the silver pixel chemicals dev and blix from freestyle as that’s what it seems people have recommended. Is there a reason I should look at some other brand?

Acetic acid; doesn't matter what brand. I use cleaning vinegar from the supermarket, diluted ca 1+4 in the RT processor or 1+10 or so one shot. Dilution isn't critical.