Selenium Toner with "Junk"

[yeknom02]

Bought some Berg Selenium Toner yesterday which had been sitting on my local camera store's shelf for a while. Maybe a year or two, but who knows. Anyway, when I pulled the bottle out of the box, I noticed that there are about three small, brownish things that look like rocks at the bottom of the bottle.

Is this normal, and should it affect the toner? This will be my first time toning.

 

[Rich Ullsmith]

Not familiar with that, but why not soak the bottle in some warm/hot water, see if you can get it back into solution.

Unless they really are rocks. If you have a mortar and pestle, I guess you could grind them up to speed the process. I am going to assume that these little brownish things are a precipitant of the regular composition of the toner.

 

[Mike Wilde]

If they are selenium precipitates, they should be quite greyish towards black.

Buy a junk little mortar and pestle from the dollar store to work with; you will want to wrap it and throw it away after using it only on a one time basis for this work.

Fish the cruddies out with nitrile gloves on your hands the whole time. Work over newspaper that you will wrap and throw out before and drips etc. can dry.

Grind the precipitate up and rinse them back into the bottle with solution from the bottle.

Read the MSDS on elemental selenium before you mess with this stuff.

I do mix from scratch for all sorts of chemistry in the darkroom.

Selenium powder or potential selenium powders I work with very carefully.

There is a good reason it us usually only sold in solution.

It should not be too bad working with while damp, but take care.