Fixer and Fixer Remover Recipes

Hey all,

I do understand that homebrew fixer will cost more than just buying it. However, my high school has a well-stocked chem department, and I have a good relationship (read, can get free stuff from) my old chem teacher. I'm planning on mixing my own sodium thiosulfate fixer (just a 100 g to 1 L dilution), but was wondering if anybody had any more complicated recipes that I should try.

On that note, anybody have any idea what's in fixer remover?

Sorry if I come off a bit inexperienced. I've only worked with bought chemicals before. I'm even making my own paRodinal for this!

At the very least, it'll be entertaining if I screw up.

I'd suggest you look at the "Articles" section of APUG: (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Not surprisingly, the section headed "Fixers" has a few recipes for different fixers.

There are some recipes for Wash-aid (aka Hypo Clearing Agent or HCA) in the "Others" section.

Thanks, Matt!

By the way, I love your signature. Adams is a hero of mine. One of my family friends actually took classes from him when he taught at UC Santa Cruz as a visiting artist!

Another thing to consider is that rapid fixer can be found pretty easily in stores, b̶u̶t̶ ̶I̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶m̶u̶l̶a̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶i̶x̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶o̶w̶n̶. Is there a reason for that? I've gotten used to the convenient, shorter times.

Techno, don't mix it using only the thiosulfate - it degrades very easily with free sulfur being a result. You should always have at least some small amount of sulfite ion in there to protect it; by some magic of chemistry, the sulfite and sulfur will recombine back into thiosulfate, restoring the original amount.

Kodak F-24 uses a mixture of sodium sulfite and sodium bisulfite, probably to control the pH; this is the simplest "official" formula I know of. (And it's in the link Matt pointed to.)

In his book, The Print, Ansel refers to what he calls "Plain Hypo Fixer," consisting of "Sodium thiosulfate (hypo)" at 240 grams per liter, plus sodium sulfite at 30 grams per liter. I just don't consider this an official formula.

In case you don't know this already, many people consider sodium thiosulfate fixers to be marginal with respect to so-called modern films, those containing some silver iodide. Generally, ammonium thiosulfate is recommended as the fixing agent for these. Hope you have fun with your experiments.

Hello,
there is a Kodak Hypo Clearing Agent (HCA) which is mainly sodium sulphite which accelerates the washing out of the residual fixer and saves water. The old Kodak Hypo Eliminator (HE) formula contains ammonia and hydrogenperoxide. This destroys residual thiosulphate by oxidation into sulphate. The use of Hypo Eliminator is not recommended as you never can be sure that really all of the hydrogenperoxide has been removed during the final washing. Peroxides attack the image silver and reduce the long time stability of the silver image.