Discoloured metol

[Lyn Arnold]

Prompted to once again mix up some Thornton's 2-bath (just checked some old negatives from this developer and they are rather nice!). However, the metol is pale coffee colour. According to "Wikipedia", metol is slightly photosensitive. As I use glycin that is somewhat "off-colour" with seemingly no ill effects in Ansco 130, what about metol? Of course, a bad negative developer is more scary than a bad print developer. Does anyone have experience with coloured metol?
Thanks, Lyn.

 

[Nicholas Lindan]

"Pale coffee color" as in coffee w/ lots of cream in it, or "pale coffee color" as in a lightly roasted bean?

If it's anything past the w/ cream color I'd dump it and start afresh.

I've had a pound of metol I've been working on for many, many years. There isn't any discoloration, though there are some purple specs in it where I swapped the lids of the sulfite and the metol jars and some sulfite crystals fell into it.

If it were me, and I was stuck with having to use it for something non-trivial, I would expose a frame or two, snip it from the camera, and do a test development.

Glycin seems to turn to a light tan very quickly and I too have used it like that with, as you say, "seemingly no ill effects". When it turns to the color of cocoa powder and mixes to very black java I pitch it (well, I haven't tried it, and it may work, but I just pitch it). I now keep glycin in a glass jam jar in the freezer, it seems to keep well that way.

 

[dpurdy]

I was given some metol once that was very old and definitely off color. Coffee with cream and some darker specks too. I mix a lot of developers and when I started using the old Metol I couldn't see any difference in the results. Took me nearly a year to get through the old stuff then I switched to brand new bright nearly white and still couldn't tell any difference in the result..
Dennis

 

[Lyn Arnold]

Thank you Nicholas and dpurdy. Good advice from experienced people.

Will take a few shots later today and do a clip test on the exposed frames.

Lyn

 

[SMBooth]

My Metol is a bit like raw sugar in colour, maybe not as dark and seem to be OK.

 

[Gerald C Koch]

I have several bottles of metol that are 20 or 30 years old. It is a pale lavender or gray in color. Brown indicates that there has been some oxidation. I would test it before developing an important roll of film.

 

[Lyn Arnold]

Thank you all once again. I shot 24 frames of Tri-X today. The light was variable -- from bright sun to deep shade. The negatives look fantastic -- still wet but enough to show me that the developer works very well.
So...my off-colour metol is fine at this stage. Have ordered some more.

Lyn