Borax Project

That should have been 68 F. Here is a scan of the print to show gradations. That is my 2 1/2 year old great grand daughter, Daisy. She saw me setting up and insisted I take her picture.

The 1947 British Journal Photographic Almanac says it's "A very excellent developer, which for some reason seems of recent years to have suffered eclipse". It's a developer that would probably al;si be ideal for making negatives for alternative processes.

ian

I can't pretend to understand more than a quarter of what you wrote, but is the point of this to decrease activity in the highlights to try and get the developemnt of the highlights and shadows to become fairly even, to render lower contrast and higher tonal tetail?

If you don't understand it, then I did a poor job of writing it.

Borax has a number of uses in photography, but if you buy developers ready-mixed or in powder form ready to mix, you may never handle borax as such. If that occasion arises, you may wonder if the borax you buy at the supermarket laundry section is suitable.

There are two problems one can encounter when measuring out a precise weight of borax powder. One is impurity of various kinds, and the other is variation in weight due to water of crystallization. Borax will crystallize with either 5 molecules of water or 10 attached to a molecule of sodium tetraborate. The dry powder is likely to be amixture of the two forms, and the proportions may change over time due to humidity in the air when you do the weighing. High priced analytical grade borax may be guaranteed to be nothing but sodium tetraborate and water, but the easiest way to assure that you are measuring out the intended amount of the borate is to make a solution that is saturated at a certain temperature. Then at any higher temperature, the weight of sodium tetraborate per unit weight of solution will be constant and can be expressed as either the decahydrate or the pentrehydrate (different numbers, of course). For most of our uses, the weight of borax per unit volume of solution will be constant above the saturation temperature. At 20 C, a saturated solution of borax is 4.71%.

As to purity, the process of crystallizing borax from a 100 C solution at or near saturation will leave most of the soluble impurities, including colloidally suspended particles, in the solution at 20 C. That solution is then discarded, The process may be repeated, each time with a loss of 47.1 grams per liter of discarded solution. When you are satisfied that the remaining borax is sufficiently pure, it my be left in the bottom of a container of pure water which will become a saturated solution whose borax content will be known.

Is it worth the trouble? Probably not if all you want borax for is to make a batch of D-76 or the like. I and I'm sure many others have used 20 Mule Team borax from the grocery store for many years.

I'm sure you will all be happy to know I have saved Photographers Formulary from ruin. I just purchased my lifetime supply of photo quality borax---5 pounds. Actually, considering I'm in my 82nd year, I may have some left to leave my heirs.

Now you can use all the tubs of hardware store borax in your bath and not worry yourself if that kind of borax is good enough for photography! :-)
Murray

BTW - I had a huge grin when I saw Daisy. My 2 Gd's are way too old to even tollerate a camera these days, more's the pity.
Your'e right - there is a ton of grays in there. Just the way I like it.
Murray

Here is a pretty good developer. You need 0.15 g. of Phenidone, 6 grams of ascorbic acid, and 400 ml of borax solution saturated at 20 C. That would be 188 grams of sodium tetraborate decahydrate if you were sure it is the decahydrate, but if there are any lumps in it, you can't be sure, so whether you go through the purification process or are sure that what you have contains only sodium, borax, hydrogen and water, you still don't know how much of the tetraborate you have. Therein lies the virtue of saturated solutions. A saturated solution of borax decanted at 20 C contains the equivalent of 4.71 grams of the tetraborate per 100 ml at any reasonable higher temperature.

I suggest the usual ploy of making a solution of Phenidone in propylene glycol or glycerol. 10 g/l or 1 g/100ml is convenient. It only takes 15 ml of such a solution to make a liter of this soup.

Mix the ascorbic acid and the 400 ml of borax solution with enough water to make 1 liter. Add the phenidone and you are ready to go. What, no sulfite? Yep. Try it without before you add any.

Developing times will be like those you would use for D-76 full strength. A liter of this solution will do 10 to 12 standard rolls if you reuse it. How? The Phenidone is regenerated by the ascorbate, which is in great excess. Phenidone is noy very much affected by bromide in solution. I read many years ago that the activity of a PQ or PC developer would increase somewhat as bromide content rose. I read this in a translation from a Russian paper which was a translation from somebody else, while I was working for NASA, but I did use a similar developer which was much like Crawley's FX-19, though I didn't know it at the time..

Incidentally, if you want to get similar performance out by substituting Q for C, you will need sulfite to activate the regeneration of the Phenidone by the Q.

188g seems a lot of borax. Does it need all that to just buffer it? Or is it a matter of 'those damned dots'?
Murray