I'm ready to try XTOL for the first time. The package is for 1.32 gallons but I only have a 1 gallon container. Will it go into solution if made in 1 gallon? If so, then I can adjust the final volumes for my film development.
XTOL 1.32 gal in a 1 gal bottle?
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I would part it out. Use half the package to make 96 ounces and you'll have enough to do it a second time and you won't have the opportunity to guess incorrectly.
Correction. 88 ounces.
See. I guessed incorrectly.
mix it up as 5L like you are supposed to and put it in a 1 gallon container and a 1L container, or 5 1L juice/soda bottles. (not stored with food products of course)
It is always a bad idea to try to mix part of a powder kit. The solid is usually non-uniform and you can get the wrong proportions of the chemistry by doing this.
PE
PE
When I was using a lot of XTOL, I used to make a 1.25X stock solution so I could fit it into gallon bottles. I never had a problem and it just takes a little longer getting it in solution. I usually developed in 1+1 working solution which is a .5X solution, so 1.25/.5 = 2.5X dilution factor. 1 part of 1.25X stock to 1.5 parts dH2O.
I personally would split it out into smaller bottles. But, when you mix it, you are supposed to mix up part A in 4 liters of water until it's fully dissolved, then mix up part B until it's fully dissolved, then fill to 5 liters. So, it all does dissolve in 4 liters, which is just a tiny bit over a gallon. I'm guessing it would store fine. You'd just have to do the math to get your dilutions right.
Actually.... you add A to 4 liter of water, then add B to it. The end result is more like 4.5 liters of solution. It won't fit in one gallon jug anyway.
Only thing one can do is to try to see if it actually dissolve into something like 3.2 liter of water. Then do the math for proper working solution strength. I really REALLY wish Kodak sticks to either Imperial or Metric... (my preference being metric...)
Just a caution... XTOL solution will very aggressively consume oxygen. If you store it in plastic bottle that is not full, it will consume oxygen and squish the bottle from inside. My suggestion for you is to get lots of smaller bottles rather than one big ones, so you can minimize oxygen exposure. It will last much longer that way. I store it in system of bottles smallest one being 250cc.
Only thing one can do is to try to see if it actually dissolve into something like 3.2 liter of water. Then do the math for proper working solution strength. I really REALLY wish Kodak sticks to either Imperial or Metric... (my preference being metric...)
Just a caution... XTOL solution will very aggressively consume oxygen. If you store it in plastic bottle that is not full, it will consume oxygen and squish the bottle from inside. My suggestion for you is to get lots of smaller bottles rather than one big ones, so you can minimize oxygen exposure. It will last much longer that way. I store it in system of bottles smallest one being 250cc.
OP
OP
Do the bottles need to be dark? I can get six 250 ml Pyrex bottles, but they're clear.
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bottles
Don't know for sure about color but I bought these with the sealing lids and 5 of them work great. Filled to the top and taped they last at least 6 months.
http://www.specialtybottle.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=23
Don't know for sure about color but I bought these with the sealing lids and 5 of them work great. Filled to the top and taped they last at least 6 months.
http://www.specialtybottle.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=23
This is exactly what I do. I use the 1 liter bottle from developing and replenish from the one gallon bottle.
Mix all the chemicals!
Steve
When I'm mixing up 5L of solution I mix it all at once, AS YOU MUST, in a large mixing container. Then I put 4L in one container right up to the top and the rest in two 500mL containers. When the two 500mL containers are finished I pour the 4L into 2L, 1L and the two 500mL containers. Then the 1L is poured into the two 500mL when they're done, then the 2L into 1L and 2 500mL and so on... until it's all gone. I find it is best to only have 500mL open at once so I can use them up fast. You need a bunch of bottles and a good labeling scheme for this but it works. Generally I try to have just one or two film and one or two paper developers on the go at once, otherwise it is too much.
I mix it up and put it into five one-litre containers. Much more convenient. Developer keeps better in full containers.
Freestyle has 5 liter plastic jugs for $2.99. I was thinking of trying XTOL and getting one of these. I think ID11 also comes in a 5 liter size. Just have to use up 2 gallons of D76 first.
Marvin
Marvin
First of all, parting out the powder is probably the worst thing you can do. There is no guarantee that you'll get an even distribution of all the chemicals in the parts, and the remaining powder doesn't keep well once exposed to air. Do yourself a favor and don't even go there.
The easiest way to deal with this is to use a larger number of smaller containers. I use cast off 1L soda pop bottles myself and have been doing so for a number of years now. They work just as well as the expensive glass lab bottles and are a bit safer to use. Wet glass is slippery and sooner or later you'll drop one. The glass will shatter, the plastic might crack; but at least you won't have sharp shards of glass waiting to do you in at the most inopportune moment.
Dark brown bottles are completely unnecessary. I don't know exactly how sensitive XTOL is to light, but it's not that sensitive. I keep sall my stuff in the darkroom, and guess what, it's already dark in there, so what's the point? Anyway, as long as you keep the bottles away from strong direct light, you'll be fine.
The easiest way to deal with this is to use a larger number of smaller containers. I use cast off 1L soda pop bottles myself and have been doing so for a number of years now. They work just as well as the expensive glass lab bottles and are a bit safer to use. Wet glass is slippery and sooner or later you'll drop one. The glass will shatter, the plastic might crack; but at least you won't have sharp shards of glass waiting to do you in at the most inopportune moment.
Dark brown bottles are completely unnecessary. I don't know exactly how sensitive XTOL is to light, but it's not that sensitive. I keep sall my stuff in the darkroom, and guess what, it's already dark in there, so what's the point? Anyway, as long as you keep the bottles away from strong direct light, you'll be fine.
Dark brown was never for light AFAIK, it was because clear glass can be reactive while the brown glass is not. For plastic it really doesn't matter but I prefer to use bottles that do NOT looks like food/drink items.
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The problem of splitting a powder such as XTOL into two or more piles having similar compositions seems closely related to the problem of sampling of an inhomogeneous powder. It is a very difficult problem, and at least one book has been written about it (Powder sampling and particle size determination
By Terence Allen). I don't pretend to be an expert on powder sampling or an expert on statistics. However, I know a little about statistics, and a bit more about chemistry and physics, and I have at least given the problem a little thought, so I thought I post a few of my thoughts on the topic.
The first thought, which may or may not have been obvious to any one person, is that Kodak has very much the same problem when they fill bags of XTOL. They must somehow produce a set of bags, each bag having a similar composition to the next. If they premix a powder and then in a separate step attempt to load powder into separate bags they are faced with exactly the same (very difficult) sampling problem under discussion here.
Kodak has either solved the sampling problem for this case to a degree that it commercially acceptable, in which case the problem is solvable, or they use an altogether different process for filling the bags that avoids the problem of sampling a premixed powder.
What process might they use to fill bags to avoid the problem of non-uniform composition between the bags? There might be several candidate processes, but the one that comes most readily to mind is to "mix" the components of the powder at the time of bag filling, i.e. to fill the bags from two or more streams of pure component. For sake of discussion let us limit this to components A and B. The problem then is to adjust the manufacturing process so the bag is always loaded with the same mass of component A. The same can be said of component B.
There would seem to be two ways of doing this, one based on mass measurement and the other based on calibrated flows of powder. For example, one could add powder A to a weighing pan, adjust the amount until it has the correct weight, and add it to the bag. Alternatively one could add powder A to the bag and weigh the bag, and assuming the weight of the bag was previously known, one would top off the bag with just enough powder to bring it up to weight. One would then to the same with component B. These mass-based processes would be expensive, though it might be possible to automate it to bring the costs in line with commercial reality, and in any case they would likely be "gold standard" methods.
The other way would be to add components A and B using some kind of calibrated flow streams, i.e. there would be a stream of component A of known flow rate and a stream of component B in another flow stream. They would be either added to the bag without any premixing, or the streams could be mixed just as or just before they are added to the bag. If mixed before being added to the bag one would need to be sure the streams do not settle into a heap before being added to the bags. Otherwise the components will stratify and we are back to the problem of uniformly sampling an inhomogeneous heap.
I should add that calibrating a flow stream would itself face a similar problem. Before a powder is introduced into a flow stream it must surely exist in a bin or a heap. To get a uniform flow from the heap (which has surely been stratified into an inhomogeneous sample with respect to particle size) would not necessarily be an easy task and would probably require constant monitoring of and tinkering with the flow stream controller.
It would be interesting to know what method Kodak uses for mixing their components and adding them to the bag.
Now, back to the problem of splitting a bag of XTOL in the home darkroom. Here we don't have the mighty process engineering infrastructure developed at Kodak over many generations, but we do have the luxury of not needing to worry too much about the cost of the process. I think there are two general approaches, which could be applied either individually or in combination.
The first is to sample from a flowing stream. This is the general approach that seems to be strongly favored in the book referred to above. Please challenge me if you disagree, but it seems to me that one reasonably practical way of doing this would be to arrange some kind of vertical divider (a board or cardboard sheet), place the dry XTOL in some kind of container that is easy to pour from (a bottle perhaps), mix the powder as best as one can (by shaking and/or inversion) and then pour the powder on the divider in such a way as to produce two piles of nearly equal volume, and by inference nearly equal mass.
There are two directions that one might orient the flow with respect to the plane of the board. It should be obvious to you that one orientation will introduce a fractionation of the composition of one pile with respect to the other. Therefore, pour in the other direction. These two piles will not generally have the same mass, so weigh them. Then mix the two piles as best as you can, and assuming that the masses of the piles are not too much different, take a small amount of material from the large pile and add it to the smaller pile. As long as the two piles are not too different in mass, and as long as your crude remixing of a pile has not produced a pile that is too badly inhomogeneous, the mass adjustment step will not perturb the compositions very much.
There is another approach you could use. Mix the dry XTOL as well as you can. Then take a very small spoon or scoop and transfer a small amount of the dry XTOL into pile 1. Similarly, transfer a small amount into pile 2. Do this without any obvious bias between the process applied to pile 1 and pile 2. For example, avoid scooping from wildly different parts of the master pile. Repeat the process, i.e. a scoop goes into pile 1 and another scoop goes into pile 2. As you go you might want to weigh the two piles so you can make minor adjustments in the amounts being added to piles 1 and 2. When you are done you should have two piles of equal mass with closely matching compositions.
If you want to be a little more sure of things you could gather pile 1. Mix it as best as you can. Pour it into a conical pile. Flatten the pile. Divide the pile into two sections using a thin flat board to make the split. You now have piles 1a and 1b. Do the same to pile 2 to make piles 2a and 2b. Mix pile 1a with 2b. Mix pile 1b with pile 2a. The result should be two piles of composition somewhat more uniform compositions than before. Of course, you can expect to need to perform some minor mass adjustments of the piles, as discussed earlier, either at the 1a/1b stage (and 2a/2b stage) or after the final mixing.
Please comment on these schemes.
P.S Wear a respirator.
P.P.S There is one other possibility that I hesitate to mention, but it is basically making a master solution, splitting it, and then vacuum evaporating to dryness. That would be even more of a pain in the neck than the ones already discussed, and one would need to design the process to minimize the possibility of oxidation.
By Terence Allen). I don't pretend to be an expert on powder sampling or an expert on statistics. However, I know a little about statistics, and a bit more about chemistry and physics, and I have at least given the problem a little thought, so I thought I post a few of my thoughts on the topic.
The first thought, which may or may not have been obvious to any one person, is that Kodak has very much the same problem when they fill bags of XTOL. They must somehow produce a set of bags, each bag having a similar composition to the next. If they premix a powder and then in a separate step attempt to load powder into separate bags they are faced with exactly the same (very difficult) sampling problem under discussion here.
Kodak has either solved the sampling problem for this case to a degree that it commercially acceptable, in which case the problem is solvable, or they use an altogether different process for filling the bags that avoids the problem of sampling a premixed powder.
What process might they use to fill bags to avoid the problem of non-uniform composition between the bags? There might be several candidate processes, but the one that comes most readily to mind is to "mix" the components of the powder at the time of bag filling, i.e. to fill the bags from two or more streams of pure component. For sake of discussion let us limit this to components A and B. The problem then is to adjust the manufacturing process so the bag is always loaded with the same mass of component A. The same can be said of component B.
There would seem to be two ways of doing this, one based on mass measurement and the other based on calibrated flows of powder. For example, one could add powder A to a weighing pan, adjust the amount until it has the correct weight, and add it to the bag. Alternatively one could add powder A to the bag and weigh the bag, and assuming the weight of the bag was previously known, one would top off the bag with just enough powder to bring it up to weight. One would then to the same with component B. These mass-based processes would be expensive, though it might be possible to automate it to bring the costs in line with commercial reality, and in any case they would likely be "gold standard" methods.
The other way would be to add components A and B using some kind of calibrated flow streams, i.e. there would be a stream of component A of known flow rate and a stream of component B in another flow stream. They would be either added to the bag without any premixing, or the streams could be mixed just as or just before they are added to the bag. If mixed before being added to the bag one would need to be sure the streams do not settle into a heap before being added to the bags. Otherwise the components will stratify and we are back to the problem of uniformly sampling an inhomogeneous heap.
I should add that calibrating a flow stream would itself face a similar problem. Before a powder is introduced into a flow stream it must surely exist in a bin or a heap. To get a uniform flow from the heap (which has surely been stratified into an inhomogeneous sample with respect to particle size) would not necessarily be an easy task and would probably require constant monitoring of and tinkering with the flow stream controller.
It would be interesting to know what method Kodak uses for mixing their components and adding them to the bag.
Now, back to the problem of splitting a bag of XTOL in the home darkroom. Here we don't have the mighty process engineering infrastructure developed at Kodak over many generations, but we do have the luxury of not needing to worry too much about the cost of the process. I think there are two general approaches, which could be applied either individually or in combination.
The first is to sample from a flowing stream. This is the general approach that seems to be strongly favored in the book referred to above. Please challenge me if you disagree, but it seems to me that one reasonably practical way of doing this would be to arrange some kind of vertical divider (a board or cardboard sheet), place the dry XTOL in some kind of container that is easy to pour from (a bottle perhaps), mix the powder as best as one can (by shaking and/or inversion) and then pour the powder on the divider in such a way as to produce two piles of nearly equal volume, and by inference nearly equal mass.
There are two directions that one might orient the flow with respect to the plane of the board. It should be obvious to you that one orientation will introduce a fractionation of the composition of one pile with respect to the other. Therefore, pour in the other direction. These two piles will not generally have the same mass, so weigh them. Then mix the two piles as best as you can, and assuming that the masses of the piles are not too much different, take a small amount of material from the large pile and add it to the smaller pile. As long as the two piles are not too different in mass, and as long as your crude remixing of a pile has not produced a pile that is too badly inhomogeneous, the mass adjustment step will not perturb the compositions very much.
There is another approach you could use. Mix the dry XTOL as well as you can. Then take a very small spoon or scoop and transfer a small amount of the dry XTOL into pile 1. Similarly, transfer a small amount into pile 2. Do this without any obvious bias between the process applied to pile 1 and pile 2. For example, avoid scooping from wildly different parts of the master pile. Repeat the process, i.e. a scoop goes into pile 1 and another scoop goes into pile 2. As you go you might want to weigh the two piles so you can make minor adjustments in the amounts being added to piles 1 and 2. When you are done you should have two piles of equal mass with closely matching compositions.
If you want to be a little more sure of things you could gather pile 1. Mix it as best as you can. Pour it into a conical pile. Flatten the pile. Divide the pile into two sections using a thin flat board to make the split. You now have piles 1a and 1b. Do the same to pile 2 to make piles 2a and 2b. Mix pile 1a with 2b. Mix pile 1b with pile 2a. The result should be two piles of composition somewhat more uniform compositions than before. Of course, you can expect to need to perform some minor mass adjustments of the piles, as discussed earlier, either at the 1a/1b stage (and 2a/2b stage) or after the final mixing.
Please comment on these schemes.
P.S Wear a respirator.
P.P.S There is one other possibility that I hesitate to mention, but it is basically making a master solution, splitting it, and then vacuum evaporating to dryness. That would be even more of a pain in the neck than the ones already discussed, and one would need to design the process to minimize the possibility of oxidation.
I concur. I purchased 1 doz of these 16 oz bottles with plastic caps; I mix the solution in a large bucket (I use the Home Depot orange 5 gal plastic bucket) and then pour the mixed solution into 10 of these glass bottles and cap them tightly. The initial cash outlay for the bottles and bucket might be higher than planned but I've used this method for several years and it works very well.
I don't know the exact answer to this but usual standard is to keep chemicals away from direct sunlight. My dark room is.... well.... dark. So color of the bottles doesn't matter. I use opaque bottles for larger ones (that's the way they came) and clear bottles for smaller ones. It works for me just fine.
Mine are all plastic of some kind. My test showed stored somewhat carefully they last 8 months or longer. My practice used to be squeeze out the oxygen from plastic bottles. Doing so caused a crack in the bottle, so I resorted to buying smaller ones.
OP
OP
OK, I have five 1 L (actually, 1.2 L to the top) chemically resistant, clear bottles. I'll fill four to the top and the rest into the fifth bottle. Sound like a plan?
Thanks to all for the responses.
That's the way to do it. See if you can find 1 smaller bottle, say around 1/2 liter. The less airspace in the bottle, the better.
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