My process is simple . I just put first two bottles in a hot water filled sink for a few minutes until I get a reading of 85 F in the developer (step one). I then drain sink, start 6.5 min. constant development. My room temp is always around 72 F so everthing remains consistant.
After I reach 1/2 capacity of the used chemistry I change my development time to 7.0 minutes, that's it. One of the beauties of using 85 deg processing is that since it is only about 12 degrees above room temperture, there is much less drift in the process temp vs. time in an untempered process. With 100 deg processing the drift would be much more of a problem. Second nice thing that WR mentioned is the dev time is 6.5 minutes which is much easier to time consistantly than 3:15 and less error prone. It is as easy as black and white. yes you have to prewarm the first two bottles to 85 deg F but that is simple in a sink of hot water. I see no point in not using at least my dirt cheap rotary system. I use plastic patterson film tank (35mm/120) and a beseler drum roller. You can both on ebay for under $50 TOTAL. sure beats tedious manual agitation. In order to use the tank on the roller, (roller wasn’t designed for a tank) I have propped up the roller approx. 1" on one side so the roller&tank is at an angle instead of horizontal. The high side is for the top side of the tank obviously. The only "trick" is I built the intermittant agitation timer myself which is a timed relay to turn motor on only 5 seconds out of every 30 seconds. But I think you could do second step with constant agitation too with same results so intermittant roller timer really isnt necessary... I use intermittant agitation for fix with BW and Bleach-fix with C41. I NEVER use intermittant agitation with any developer ( BW or C41 ) process, constant agitation seems to be most consistant for this critical step. JCO -----Original Message----- From: William Robb [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 10:23 AM To: pentax-discuss@pdml.net Subject: Re: Decisions...Decisions... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Shel Belinkoff" Subject: Re: Decisions...Decisions... > When you (or JCO) get a moment, can you provide a brief rundown on > what's > needed. No rush ... A rotary processor is nice, but if you can do bare bones processing, a stainless tank will do fine. The standard C-41 process runs at 38ºC and has a development time of 3:15, which is hot and short for a dump and refill process, so I would definitely look into one of the low temp long time chemistry sets. The Arista that JCO mentioned seems about ideal. 85ºF is well within the range of a low tech waterbath approach to chemical tempering, You could probably do it with a sink of warm water, and spike it with hot when the temp starts to fall off. Development time and temp is pretty critical, but after that, it isn't so important. You can bleach/fix at just about any temp as long as you extend the times out to compensate, the same applies to the wash. Just don't pour cold into a warm tank, the film will reticulate. William Robb
