Re: Ground glass and baking soda in Dektol

On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Jim Noel wrote:

<snip>

> As for BAking soda in dektol, don't do it. The use of baking soda will
> increase the activity of the developer and thus create mor cpontrast, not
> less.
> Jim

I disagree. I have experimented with this. When I added baking soda to
dektol it decreaed the contrast to some extent.

I believe Dektol uses Sodium Carbonate as its alkali agent - it has a pH
of around 11 in solution

Baking Soda is made of sodium Bicarbonate - it has a pH of around 8 in
solution.

Adding Baking Soda should lower the pH to some extent.

I don't know if the sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate react in any
way at room temperature.

In my experiments it has.

There are better ways of reducing contrast, so I don't really recommend
using this in practice, but I was curious to see if it would work.

Gord
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Gordon J. Holtslander Dept. of Biology
holtsg@duke.usask.ca 112 Science Place
http://duke.usask.ca/~holtsg University of Saskatchewan
Tel (306) 966-4433 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Fax (306) 966-4461 Canada S7N 5E2
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Received on Thu May 2 11:47:44 2002