Hi.
I mixed a gallon of Dektol this morning. Unfortunately, I apparently did not keep the water hot enough; the crystals failed to dissolved thouroughly. My prints are now cloudy, with swirling black and grey tones. Can I correct this somehow? I am afraid to boil the stuff...probably not a good idea.
toss it... sorry
Wait a day.
Percy,
1.) Don't boil.
2.) Follow David's suggestion.
3.) If #2 doesn't work. Wait another day.
4.) If #'s 2 & 3 don't work. See Frank's suggestion.
Sorry.
What about putting the jug in a container of water large enough to warm it back up?
It would certainly do no harm to rewarm the solution, as long as you don't get it hot enough to cause decomposition of the metol and hydroquinone. It's most likely the sodium sulfite that's incompletely dissolved; there's a lot of that and it's very slow to dissolve in room temperature water.
A water bath to warm the mixture is the best idea -- up to 120 F doesn't seem to do any harm. Another consideration is that if your tap water is *extremely* hard, you might have more dissolved calcium than the sequestrant in the Dektol can block, and get a precipitate of insoluble calcium sulfite; there's no simple way to identify that species from undissolved sodium sulfite, but unless your tap water is terribly hard it's not likely to account for a significant problem (especially one that affects the operation of the developer).
FWIW, using distilled water heated to 120 F, I was able to dissolve a 5 gallon Dektol pack in half the recommended amount of water, a necessity after discovering that the package was not 5 1-gallon packs in a single box, but rather one big brick of loose powder (I didn't have five gallons of storage bottles available). I just have to remember to dilute twice as much (the 1+3 I like becomes 1+7).
If a contact print at arm's length is too small to see, you need a bigger camera. :D
False economy- throw it out.
I don't know about that. I usually try to mix most stock solutions a day in advance as a matter of course, just to be sure everything dissolves and is settled when I'm ready to use it. The only exception is when I run out in the middle of a processing session.
I don't know what to do about this for now but for the future, bring the water to a boil before mixing the Dektol in. I forget what temperature Kodak suggests but IIRC it's lower than boiling. I'm not a chemist, if someone kowledgeable about chemistry says this is a bad idea follow them, not me, but I did this for years after reading it as a tip in one of the photo magazines and it never did any harm that I could see and it seemed to speed up the dissolving process.
Brian Ellis
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
a mile away and you'll have their shoes.
For the price of it, unless it is liken to gold in your area. Toss it, learn from the mistake, and be better safe than sorry. I use dektol as a one-time use (when used) simply because of the low price of it. Even if it is only one or two prints.
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