Metol Based Developers

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Ian-Barber

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When using Metol based developers like D23/D76 etc, is there a minimum amount of Metol you need.

I want to try the Barry Thornton 2 Bath developer but rather than mix up 1L I just wanted to mix up 500ml but that would using just 3.125g and not sure if there is a min required amount.
 
Ian-Barber said:
When using Metol based developers like D23/D76 etc, is there a minimum amount of Metol you need.

I want to try the Barry Thornton 2 Bath developer but rather than mix up 1L I just wanted to mix up 500ml but that would using just 3.125g and not sure if there is a min required amount.
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I routinely mix D-23 to be 1:1 by adding 7.5g metol and 100g Sodium Sulfite into two liters of water. This is effectively 3.75g/l and it works swimmingly. Moreover, when kept in full, brown glass bottles, it maintains its useful life for quite a few months so long as you do not exhaust its capacity.

I've meant to do further testing with increased dilutions to see if I can get the same compensation effects with greater acuity using long (semi) stand development. I'd guess that doubling the water above to 4l whilst maintaining the same chemical weights would likely work but I've not actually tried it.
 
Based on that, then I see no reason why I should not be able to make 500ml with 1/2 the quantities
 
That 500ml would be identical to the 500-ml you’d get if you‘d made a litre and divided it.
There is a problem with using small quantities, but that is with mixtures of components. There’s no way to know if it’s uniform, so you might be sampling only one of them. My understanding is that the ingredients are dispensed individually into the retail container, so they may be in several layers of indistinguishable white powder. With a single substance, this problem should not arise. The problem of weighing extremely small quantities accurately remains. Subdividing a known solution is one way around this, if the solution is sufficiently stable.
 
I take your point but my main concern was whether only having such a small amount of metol would be sufficient for it to be active enough. I was just thinking along the lines of HC110 whereby you need a min of 6ml
 
Ian-Barber said:
I take your point but my main concern was whether only having such a small amount of metol would be sufficient for it to be active enough. I was just thinking along the lines of HC110 whereby you need a min of 6ml
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I see Nik & Trick are selling a 1 litre kit of this developer made by Bellinni or with their chemicals. Maybe it would be worth contacting them about it with this point?
 
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