Thornton two bath developer question

[naeroscatu]

Yesterday I run out of my beloved D-76 when I still had two rolls to go. I looked around and found two bottles of Thorton developer (A and B) that I put together about one year ago but never used. I knew this developer has a long shelf time and it is very flexible in terms of temperature and developing time but I could not remember reading if it handles differently when used with various BW film brands.
I took a chance (negs were not very important) and processed one Kodak Plus X and one Ilford FP4 (both 125 ISO though) in the same Patterson tank for 4 min in each solution. Both films turned out very well and close to one another in terms of contrast and tonal range. Is this normal, can I extend this practice to other brands (of course staying within the same ISO)?. Thanks

 

[Robert Hall]

Both of those films had a similar dev time for the same developers. I would guess that your gut feeling of it working on any film might be a little displaced.

If you're negatives are less important than the savings of your developer, then you could give it a try.

I couldn't do that myself, I hold my negs a bit dearer than that.

I do think Barry's developer is a pretty good developer by the way.