[Leica] OT: What went wrong? (B&W developing resulting intransparent negatives)

[surrealistic at cox.net (Curtis Fant)]

You can check your film after it has been in the fixer for about a minute.  
If everything has worked up until then, you should see the negatives slowly 
clearing.  If your film is totally clear, even the leaders, it sounds like 
bad developer or incorrectly mixed stuff to me.  I would start over with all 
new chemicals and make sure everything is properly labeled.  Don't be 
discouraged, just get right back in there and shoot another roll.

Curtis
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Marc Osborne 
  To: lug@leica-users.org 
  Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2005 11:51 PM
  Subject: [Leica] OT: What went wrong? (B&W developing resulting 
intransparent negatives)


  Hello everyone,

  After a 10 year hiatus I decided to dust off the darkroom equipment
  and start doing some B&W shooting, developing, and printing again. I
  went to the local camera store and bought Sprint developer, stop bath,
  and fixer. This is a local company, based in Rhode Island, that I
  remember as making fairly good products, already in liquid form, so
  the final mix was alway easy to do.

  I never had a problem through the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. I used my
  father's (now mine) IIIf and generally Kodak film and chemicals so
  ending up with a completely transparent roll of film was very
  disappointing. Here was my process:
  Loading the film onto the Patterson tank was no problem. I had
  complete darkness.
  Chemicals all at 68 degrees fahrenheit.
  Sprint recommended time for Tri-X 400 was 10 minutes. Poured in the
  diluted 1:9 developer and agitated and knocked off bubbles as per
  standard photography book and patterson tank sheet recommendation.
  Poured out developer back into what I thought was empty developer bottle.
  Poured in properly diluted stop bath
  REALIZED I might have poured developer into fixer bottle:(
  Poured out stop bath and ran downstairs to remix fixer...lost maybe 2
  to 3 minutes in doing so. At that time the stop bath had been poured
  back into it's proper container but the roll of film was undoubtedly
  still dripping with it.
  Poured in fixer and agitated for three minutes. 
  Poured out fixer and washed for 30 minutes.
  Mixed bottle cap of photo-flo with 1 quart of water.
  After 30 minutes of washing and occasional agitation poured out water,
  poured in photo-flo and thought it was pretty darn bubbly. Agitated
  for a minute, made it more bubbly, poured it ouf, poured in more water
  to get rid of bubbles.
  Pulled film off the reel and looked right through it. Completely
  transparent end to end.

  This was not the return to my glory years of B&W that I had foreseen.
  I just bought an M2 to I could gradually retire the IIIf and make use
  of all the advances of the M series. But this was a rude shock. Please
  help. Where did I go wrong? Was it the interval between the stop bath
  and the fixer? Could the Sprint chemicals have been on the shelf too
  long? I don't know where to start again.

  Thanks,

  Marc
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