Sprint Chemistry: reasons not to use it

erikg said:

Here's a note about the Sprint spigots. They don't make them of course, they are sourced and the manufacturer has given them a design "feature" that Sprint is aware of and that they wish wasn't there. That is that the spigot is fully closed at 90º but the spigot itself will turn past that point so if it's pushed as far as it can go towards the box the valve will be open just a little, causing it to drip. If you look at one closely you can see why. When I managed a student lab and we had the big cubes in use I gave up trying point this out and I just made drip cups from old milk bottles instead. In my own darkroom I just tip the box on it's back just as you do. Sprint has tried to source a different spigot but so far other samples are not threaded the same as the bladder they use. They have also asked the spigot maker to put a stop on the lever but they said it was too costly to change. You may have noticed that they are now applying labels to the bottom of the 5 liter cubes so the box is easily identifiable when it is tipped on it's back.

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Greg Davis said:

If you have never put a spigot on a cubitainer, lay it on its back and pull the bladder out of the box opening, then screw on the spigot and make sure the spigot is off before tilting the box forward. Also, the spigots drip when closed, so you may want to keep the box on its back when not in use to prevent that....

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Michael R 1974 said:

Perhaps I should have posted this in the other Sprint thread, but I just noticed something interesting in Sprint's description and MSDS for Block stop bath. It is a buffered acetic acid-sodium acetate stop bath which operates at a higher pH of about 4. This is closer to an "ideal" acid stop bath formula than plain acetic or citric acid stop baths. I didn't think any commercially available buffered stop baths existed. Just found a few others from Freestyle. Anyhow, there you go.

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