Kodak Monobath

Ian Grant said:

So dangerous that it's sold in the chemists as a 10% solution as wart treatment and has no effect on surrounding skin, it's also used in the manufacture of vaccines.

There plenty of common photographic and household chemicals that are far more dangerous.

Ian

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Well Ian your last remark is a bit of a "dooddoener" as we say in Dutch, a platitude as in water is dangerous you can drown in it, I am not saying one should not use it, but if you look here:

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/sial/g4004?lang=en&region=NL

You'll see for 25% Glutaraldehyde:

Personal Protective Equipment Faceshields, full-face respirator (US), Gloves, Goggles, multi-purpose combination respirator cartridge (US), type ABEK (EN14387) respirator filter

I think it's important that people should be aware of the stuff they work with..

Best,

Cor

Monobaths by their nature (high pH) can cause severe softening of the emulsion and must contain a hardening agent. Glutaraldehyde was chosen as a safer alternative to the more common formaldehyde.

I think it's important that people should be aware of the stuff they work with..

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That is why we should encourage people to read the MSDS for any chemical they are going to use. They are readily available on the web.

Finally I am able to order a bunch of that Kodak Monobath. When I have it I will update here if it works and how it works.

Cor said:

You all know that gluteraldehyde is nasty stuff, right ?

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good luck trying to convince a photographer that any photochemistry is dangerous !
OR that somethings need to be disposed of with care and sensitivity ... making the soup is 1/2 the problem

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from what a retired chemist ( now dec. ) told me
older style films work best with monobaths not modern
tgrained emulsions that contain lots of polyvinyl acetate (fillers)
who knows, he might be wrong.
last time i spoke with him IDK 15+ years ago
he hadn't used the dev or tab grained film in years. i've recounted this story in other threads
but ... he shot some 8mm film and developed the negatives
in a monobath and to prove a point about how great the developer was, he enlarged
a frame from these negatives and presented the 16x20 prints on the wall of the office. he worked for
photo lab index and they were having some sort of shin-dig/party that night and the print caught
answell addams eye. aadams was amazed at now the print looked and asked if they were made
with large format film, and was equally amazed when he learned the print was made with subminiature film...
jerry ( the chemist ) was going to give the developer recipe to fiddle around with at some point, but
ended up dying before transfering this knowledge to me ...

Monobaths tend to be fairly caustic, so there's plenty of reason to be careful with them. Even with FX6a, which contains no gluteraldehyde or formaldehyde, I'd use gloves and eye protection.

Monobaths need to be tweaked to suit specific films (or papers) to get the best results and the thread is about one balanced for processing Dental X-ray films. The beauty of a Monobath is here's no variables in terms of temperature, time, etc affecting development as processing is to completion, (within a set temperature range that will vary with the developer formula). The downside is once made up you have no control over contrast, density etc with a Monobath.

If you compare a PQ X-ray developer to a normal film developer or better still PQ Universal (1+19 for films) you'll see an X-ray developer is very active, much higher contrast and usually to a higher density. Ilford ID-72 is an X-ray developer, ID-62 PQ Universal, the first is used Full Strength, the second dilute, bearing that in mind the Xray developer is far more concentrated and has very significantly higher activity.

So it'll be interesting to see Peter's results.

Ian

Also have a look on what I use: https://sordent.nl/collections/ront...Xzr9TkBN_dqRdc9oSgMoctwGtrEi36pncNN_FE9T0AmmO

JP de Boer said:

Also have a look on what I use: https://sordent.nl/collections/ront...Xzr9TkBN_dqRdc9oSgMoctwGtrEi36pncNN_FE9T0AmmO

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Welcome to Photrio!
Interesting choice of chemistry. But not a monobath solution, or do you mix the developer and the fixer?