Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/03/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Your other sheet film usually comes out? How do you run it? Rubber tanks, trays, Jobo? How many negs were they in how much sauce? HAD you left your Xtol in a half filled bottle for 6-8 weeks and not a filled up one? The new box for D 400 is noticeably different. It's got a gold seal on it. You'd have noticed if you were using that i think. Ah NOW i read partially-full at the bottom of our post. That was my guess as to the problem. If you love what you are getting from Xtol than you have to force yourself to deal with a couple of quirks. IT'S MAIN QUIRK!!: IMO is that the first thing you've got to do when you get your Xtol is take a drive to the bottle store. I got mine from a labortory supply house, that is a catagory in the yellow pages. Tell them you are setting up a meth lab in your trailor so they gave you a discout!.(ouch don't go there!:)) And get 5 one liter glass bottles and one or two half and quarter liter bottles. (500mls and 250mls) They don't have to be brown but they do have to be glass. (all they're gonna have is brown) Why? Because no one who has ever done this has ever had any problems with their Xtol giving out on them. (Unless they got old one liter envelopes. A problem i hear is resolved but you wont find me buying them.) I've been watching and participating in the darkroom newsgroup for years and that is the definite consensus. A photographer friend of mine pours his Xtol out not into 5 one liter brown glass bottles but TEN half liter bottles!! It is most often the case that he uses these as a one shot but if not pours the remainder into a bottle IT'S SIZE. (The 500mls or 250mls bottles) A HALF FULL BOTTLE YOU MIGHT AS WELL LEAVE THE CAP OFF!! They used to make inert gas you could pour into bottles. If they still make that stuff I'd stay away from it. Those accordion plastic bottles are disasters. Troop talks about this in the new updated "Darkroom Cookbook." Don't trust plastic. It breaths. People who LOVE plastic and have a paranoid fear of broken glass say it's 99 percent inert. That one percent seems to be all it needs. I sound like a geek but when i got back from our local libratory supply house with my brown glass lab bottles and screw on caps. (You've got to remember to ask for the caps and you may have a choice of two different kind of caps) and made a 8 Xtol labels with a label maker and lined those little brown beauties all in a row up on the shelf over my sink I felt i was really set up!!! This was a few years back and it has turned out I am nicely set up. These filled up bottles last for many a month. A year would not surprise me which is what Kodak had tested it at. Mark Rabiner Portland, Oregon USA Updated ALL MY DESIGN webpage!! http://www.rabiner.cncoffice.com/ Chick the "personal work" Link!