Film speed, developer testing

[Bruce Appel]

I have read through the archives on the subject, but want some more thoughts. Years ago I learned a technique of film speed and developer time testing , using a kodak grey scale. Basically, you adjust your shadow exposure, zone I, to match the density of the 48 wedge on the scale. For zone vIII you adjust your development to get the density to match the 6 wedge. This has worked well, requires no special equipment, and is reasonably accurate.
The shortcoming I see now is that it takes nothing into consideration about the paper.
So, here is my question. If I use the print scale and piece of blank film to get fb+f, and do a series of tests to get the zone I on the paper to match the 48 wedge, I should be able to see how many zones the paper and proccess will actually print.
If that's true, and say my paper will only go to about a zone vII highlight, should I adjust the development time of the film to match. In other words, make my zone VIII density match the density of the zone VII of the paper?

 

[gainer]

Print the exposure scale directly on the paper to get the paper scale in terms of steps of the exposure scale.

 

[Bruce Appel]

I think I either got lucky, or worried for naught, as the densities of the paper matched the densities of the negative. If that makes sense. Now to actually take some pictures and see what happens.