Setting up and shutting down the print processing line

Purpose

To put five trays on a bench in an order your hand can find in the dark, prove that each of them is what its label says, and take the line down afterwards with both clocks read and every stream in its own container.

When to use it

The first and last twenty minutes of every printing evening, whatever is being printed. It ends where the archival sequence begins and picks up again after the last sheet leaves the wash.

The times, dilutions and temperatures belong to your paper’s and your developer’s own sheets. This procedure sets the line up; it does not choose the numbers.

Before you start

You should already know why a pair of tongs that has been in the fixer never touches the developer, and how a tray drifts over an evening, from session consistency.

Level A, in the concentrations the maker supplies: nitrile gloves, eye protection, tongs, ordinary through-draught ventilation, and nothing eaten or drunk at the bench. Mixing a developer from solids is a separate session at its own level; tonight the bottles already exist.

On the bench: five dishes, either coloured differently or marked DEV, STOP, FIX 1, FIX 2 and HOLD; four pairs of tongs; a thermometer; the timer; the session log and the fixer’s capacity log; blotters or a rack; the labelled waste containers standing where you can reach them from the sink.

Procedure

Setting up

1. Run lab opening and confirm that tonight is inside the safe time the safelight test established.
2. Set the five dishes out left to right in the same order as last time, and leave that order alone for the rest of the evening.
3. Read the developer’s date and its running sheet count off the bottle and the log before you pour it. A bath that is already at its published capacity, or that has stood in an open dish since a previous session, is replaced now rather than during the batch.
4. Dilute each bath immediately before use, to its maker’s published dilution, and write down which dilution you used.
5. Mix a little warm, so the baths settle at the working temperature instead of passing through it.
6. Put one pair of tongs in each developer dish and leave it there. The fourth pair lives with the stop and the fixers and travels one way only, downstream.
7. Fill the fifth dish with clean water. It is a holding bath, not a wash and not a fixer.
8. Bring every bath, the wash water included, into the band your paper’s sheet publishes, and write down the reading of each rather than the number you intended.
9. Fill both fixing baths and confirm which is bath 1 tonight, by the rotation. Write the running totals of both at the top of the log.
10. Stand the waste containers where a full vessel can reach them one-handed from the sink.
11. Make one test sheet before the work starts and note the time at which the image appeared. That figure is tonight’s baseline for the developer and costs nothing.

Shutting down

12. Take the last sheet out and stop. Do not add work to a bath you have decided is finished.
13. Add up the session’s area, counting strips: about eight 25 mm strips off a 10-inch sheet make one 8 × 10 equivalent. Enter the total against each bath’s published capacity.
14. Read the emergence time of the last sheet and write it beside the first.
15. Empty the developer into the alkaline container and the stop into the acid container, by general chemical waste. They do not share.
16. Empty the fixers and the first wash into the silver-bearing container, by its own procedure. What may lawfully be done with either container is settled by the disposal caveat and your own authority, not here. Check your local regulations.
17. Rotate the fixers if the log says bath 1 has reached its ceiling: discard bath 1, promote bath 2, mix a fresh bath 2, and write the date of the change.
18. Rinse and dry every dish and every pair of tongs separately, and hang the tongs so no two touch.
19. Cap and date the developer bottle, or discard it if the standing clock has run out.
20. Wipe the bench, the dish lips and the floor in front of the sink, and run lab closing.
21. Close the session log before you leave the room.

How you know it worked

• The dishes stood in the same left-to-right order all evening and no pair of tongs changed dish.
• Every bath’s temperature was read and written, the wash included.
• Both fixing baths carry a running total, and the total is under the published ceiling.
• Two emergence times are in the log, one from the first sheet and one from the last.
• Each waste stream went into its own labelled container, and nothing acid met the fixer’s container.
• The bench, the dish lips and the floor are dry, and the paper box is closed.

If a step fails

Step 3, the developer stood in an open dish since a previous session. It is finished, whatever the sheet count says. The standing clock and the work clock run independently, and whichever ends first ends the bath.

Step 5, the room is much colder or warmer than the working band. Deepen the trays and stand the developer in a water bath at the working temperature. Do not compute your way out of a drifting tray: hold the temperature instead.

Step 8, a bath is outside the band and there is no time to temper it. Record the reading and print anyway only if nothing tonight will be compared against another session’s work. A matched set is not made across a temperature you did not hold.

Step 9, you cannot tell which fixer was bath 1. Then the rotation has lost its state, and the safe reading is that both baths are as tired as the more tired one. Discard both, mix fresh, and start the log again.

Step 11, the emergence time is half again as long as your usual figure. The developer is telling you now what the sheet count would tell you later. Replace it before the batch rather than during it.

Step 15, a stream has gone into the wrong container. Stop, label the container with both contents and the date, and treat it as an unknown by the unlabelled container procedure. An acid arriving in a container of spent fixer is the specific case the separation exists against.

Step 17, the fixer reached its ceiling in the middle of the batch. Every sheet after the crossing is suspect. Note where it fell, and settle it with the clearing-time test rather than by eye.

What to record

The session log’s opening line before the first sheet — date, the four bath temperatures, paper and box code, developer, dilution and date opened, both fixers’ running totals — and its closing line afterwards: the sheet count as area, the two emergence times, the fixer rotation if one happened, the wash route, the drying method, and where each stream went. A line written from memory the next morning is a different document.