Coverage of a Konica Hexanon GR II 260mm?

[photoevangelist]

Have you considered using a Jobo 28XX drum extension set?

I do most of my 7x17 in one (2 sheets at a time).

Yeah, I took your recommendation about 7 months back and got one for conventional films. I worked out the kinks with 5x7 film, so I think I'm ready for FP4+ and HP5+ in 7x17. Problem is: I'm using xray film which has emulsion on both sides.

[Lachlan 717]

Problem is: I'm using xray film which has emulsion on both sides.

Ouch… I see what you mean.

[Scott Davis]

I tried using the 3063 Expert drum for my 14x17 and found I had too many issues no matter what solution I tried. So I switched to tray processing 1 sheet at a time and although it's tediously slow, I couldn't be happier with my results.

[Lachlan 717]

What were the issues, Scott?

I can do three sheets of 7x17 in my 3063, so I'm guessing you we're only doing 1 at a time.

[Scott Davis]

Lachlan- the issues I had were:

- if using a sheet of 14x17 in the drum straight up, I would get lines in the negative caused by developer flow disruption from the ribs on the drum.

- I tried making an insert sheet out of a flexible plastic. The problem was positioning the film on the sheet. I made little corners to keep the film centered on the sheet, but the glue holding them on to the main sheet would inevitably dissolve and they'd come off, floating around in the drum, potentially scratching my emulsion and no longer holding the sheet in place.

- I had the best success with a tip someone gave me here, getting window insulation foam and cutting it in little squares to put at the bottom of the drum around the circumfrence and around the barrel at the height of my film. This solved the floating around problem and the scratching problem, as even if the squares became detached during processing, they weren't going to scratch my film. However, they caused a different, far more problematic flow disruption. Instead of having vertical lines running the height of the negative that were almost invisible on the film to the naked eye (but showed up rather blatantly in an alt-process print - a REALLY big deal when between the film and the print, you've just spent close to $40 to make the print!), I would have large, irregular blotchy areas of mis-development where the foam block stuck out from behind the edge of the film. In some cases I could just trim the print to crop the development flaw out of the image, but it was bad enough that it could ruin a shot where cropping would remove something else vital to the image or otherwise throw off the composition.