After I got a bunch of help from the knowledgeable folks on this forum and managed to successfully switch over to E72 paper developer, I got curious about other DIY options, and found a Mytol recipe I want to try. By all accounts it produces nearly identical results to XTOL film developer, it just has a terrible shelf life.
I'm pretty dedicated to mixing up small, one-shot batches of my developers (I'm even doing this with E72 because it's inexpensive enough), which is why I've never tried XTOL before. Pretty strictly an HC-110 and Rodinal guy to this point. I want to try this approach with Mytol. For me, a single-roll batch of Mytol is 200ml total soup at 1+1 working strength (so 100ml of stock solution).
That means two of the ingredients would need to be measured in quantities to tiny that I don't trust my reloading scale's precision. Specifically, this quantity of developer would require 15mg of Phenidone and 10mg of KBr. For paper developer I can fudge it a bit, since I'm doing test strips and seeing immediate results in the tray, so if one batch of E72 has a bit more Phenidone in it than a different one, I probably won't even notice, just compensate as I go.
The obvious solution would be to mix up some kind of solution that uses a small-but-measurable quantity of Phenidone at a known dilution, and then use a more easily measurable quantity of that solution to make the working-strength Mytol. It looks like people regularly do this with Phenidone and ethanol. Would this work in another fluid? Isopropyl alcohol? Denatured? Water? Propylene Glycol? Once Phenidone is in solution, does a timer start ticking on shelf life?
Same questions for KBr, really. I'm not a chemist. Thanks in advance!
I'm pretty dedicated to mixing up small, one-shot batches of my developers (I'm even doing this with E72 because it's inexpensive enough), which is why I've never tried XTOL before. Pretty strictly an HC-110 and Rodinal guy to this point. I want to try this approach with Mytol. For me, a single-roll batch of Mytol is 200ml total soup at 1+1 working strength (so 100ml of stock solution).
That means two of the ingredients would need to be measured in quantities to tiny that I don't trust my reloading scale's precision. Specifically, this quantity of developer would require 15mg of Phenidone and 10mg of KBr. For paper developer I can fudge it a bit, since I'm doing test strips and seeing immediate results in the tray, so if one batch of E72 has a bit more Phenidone in it than a different one, I probably won't even notice, just compensate as I go.
The obvious solution would be to mix up some kind of solution that uses a small-but-measurable quantity of Phenidone at a known dilution, and then use a more easily measurable quantity of that solution to make the working-strength Mytol. It looks like people regularly do this with Phenidone and ethanol. Would this work in another fluid? Isopropyl alcohol? Denatured? Water? Propylene Glycol? Once Phenidone is in solution, does a timer start ticking on shelf life?
Same questions for KBr, really. I'm not a chemist. Thanks in advance!