Home-Brew Acetaminophen Rodinal Works!

[ZorkiKat]

It could be GongYuan (Century), which is the only BW film other than Lucky that I can find in Shanghai. GongYuan is a bit cheaper than Lucky per roll (5.5RMB vs 7RMB for ISO400 films).

你好“叶“ leafy 🙂

Its definitely not "公元” (Era). I've used Era/"Gongyuan Quanse jiaojuan" for years and it was much finer than what I'm using now. The film's pancake container (which I saw in the spooler's HQ) had markings in Chinese, and the only part I could read there was its place of origin-Xiamen. I don't remember seeing Xiamen as the address of the Era factory in its leaflets. We also had Xiamen film (also not as good as Era, and Lucky seems to be the best among the lot) and paper here, but from what I heard, the Xiamen photochemical works have been
taken over by Kodak and makes colour negative film now. The budget Kodak color films here are marked as "film made by Kodak Xiamen...."

Jay

 

[derevaun]

Red Devil lye has apparently been discontinued, and I've not come across another brand of dry NaOH. It's an ingredient in methamphetamine production, and many retailers in the Northwest are happy to make it harder to make meth. I feel pretty good about that too. I used a 29% NaOH liquid drain cleaner to make the acetaminophen developer, and it worked just fine. I've seen drain cleaners that use some solution of sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide, which would actually be a little closer to the Agfa formula.

But IMHO there's no need for precision with this stuff: as long as there's about 3 times as much sulfite as acetaminophen and about 2 times as much sulfite as hydroxide, it'll produce the developing agent of Rodinal which will develop film like Rodinal does. Finding the perfect dilution takes some trial & error, and it probably won't last for years. But the truth is that it's hard to truly ruin a roll of film with reasonably fresh developer. It's possible, and if the fun doesn't justify that risk, there's really not much else to recommend it, IMHO.