Home made rodinal with electrolyte?

ericdan · May 23, 2020

My buddy got stuck on an island in the pandemic travel restrictions. Built a darkroom in his rental place and mixed up rodinal with Tylenol etc. to develop his film. The bottle that said distilled water actually had battery fluid inside. He only noticed that days after he developed the film with it. He wanted to take a sip of water and found it tastes like stop bath.
Isn’t battery fluid highly acidic? How did that rodinal manage to develop the film? I thought film only develops in alkaline environments?
I saw the negatives and prints he made from the film. The film had a decent amount of base fog but it worked!

btaylor · May 23, 2020

Battery fluid is sulfuric acid. If he took a sip of it he would have severe chemical burns.

ericdan · May 23, 2020

Maybe it was something else then?

koraks · May 23, 2020

ericdan said:
Maybe it was something else then?

There are two products aimed at batteries. Battery acid, ie sulfuric acid 36-37%, and distilled water. If the rodinal worked and your buddy still has his front teeth, it was the latter. The funny taste was probably just from the plastic bottle.

Please tell your friend not to drink stuff he buys in the auto store unless it comes from a soft drinks vending machine.

ericdan · May 23, 2020

That’s good advice!

Truzi · May 23, 2020

So long as it was just a VERY TINY taste he should be okay.

Once while working on a car as a teenager I had a few drops of battery acid hit my mouth and lips. I immediately rant to the sink to flush, and suffered no burns or other ill consequences. It tasted a bit like very strong lemon juice.

When I returned to the car my father had thought I ran inside because I heard the phone ringing, lol.

Donald Qualls · May 23, 2020

Given the description that it "tastes like stop bath," I'm inclined to think there may have been a low concentration of acetic acid in the bottle -- i.e. "distilled vinegar", which is 5% acetic acid v/v, as opposed to "distilled water". Given that Parodinal starts by adding a bunch of lye to the water, the lye neutralized the vinegar first, then there was still enough left to make the developer work more or less correctly.

I'd be more worried that your friend knows what stop bath tastes like, except it was probably a shorthand, "tastes like stop bath smells" since vinegar is a very distinctive and recognizable taste and smell, and taste (other than the five basics) is mostly smell anyway.

laingsoft · May 24, 2020

Tylenol should work as a dev provided the pH is above 9.5ish. Most likely your buddy used an excess of hydroxide anyways, so it's likely the pH was well above the threshold.

Drinking lab chemicals is a good way to die. Acids are bad, but a sip of base, or a sip of the wrong chemical can leave you with lifelong disabilities.

Donald Qualls · May 24, 2020

laingsoft said:
Drinking lab chemicals is a good way to die.

There is that little jingle about the absent-minded professor. But in this situation, it's a case of taking a sip from a bottle thought to contain water, used as water in mixing a developer, and probably labeled in a way that could lead one to think it's water until you catch a whiff.

Seems like the main moral here is to pay attention any time you're either mixing chemicals (mixing the wrong things can produce poisonous gases, or spatter strong acids or alkali, or other bad things much worse than giving you a blank roll) or drinking from a bottle you didn't just fill yourself.

bnxvs · May 25, 2020

When I was young and started working on an oil drilling rig, I knew one good locksmith, "skillful fingers". Unfortunately, it was an alcoholic. Therefore, sometimes, when there was not enough money, he drank diesel from a hangover. Now I think - how good that he wasn't a photographer...

Home made rodinal with electrolyte?

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