Hi, I've got a batch of students films to process kentmere 100, we only have xtol available at the moment, and there's no times on the dev chart :/ also I've seen times for kentmere 400 ranging from 9.5 mins to 12 min 1:1 at 20c so that hasn't helped me guestimate!!!
does anyone have experience of times at all? I know it's a huge shortcut and I should test but limited time and materials !!!
As much as this is worth: I've done Kentmere 100 at EI 100 in Xtol 1+1 for 12 minutes, with gentle agitation 5 seconds every whole minute. With my setup I got easily printed negatives that prints well on grade 2 or 3, depending on what contrast I would want for a given image.
I'd suggest a test using a dozen "correctly metered and rated" exposures (ie. not a random student film), which should contain some shadow and some highlight areas, cut off from the cassette in camera then develop a short section at your choice of likely time another at -20% and another at +20%. If you have a deep tank system this time variation will be very easy to arrange, but even with a hand-tank it will only take forty minutes or so to get something where you can compare the negatives - you don't even need to dry them.