A friend of a friend gave me a box full of old photoprocessing chemicals. One of the bottles is "Elon Developing Agent," which Kodak tells me is Metol. I described the bottle to them (glass, with a metal cap) and they told me that it was old, as the newer chemicals are in plastic bottles. The powder inside isn't caked or hard, and they couldn't say whether it was still good to use. I would like to mix a batch of D-23 with this. Does anybody know if it's still good? Thanks.

-- John Brown (countryboy2@hotmail.com), May 13, 2002

Answers

John, chances are your old bottle of metol is still good. However, since metol is quite cheap, I would not bother with it. Unless you can quantitatively measure its development properties against a known benchmark, you'll have no way of knowing if it's 100% functional, 90%, 80% .... I'm sure it will work, but that happens when you use it up and make a new batch from fresh chemicals? You'll have to do your tests all over again. It's not worth the trouble. I say, pitch it and buy new chemicals.

-- Ted Kaufman (writercrmp@aol.com), May 13, 2002.

I would agree with Ted. I have used Metol with parts of it with brown particles (due to moisture) and it worked fine but if you want consistency, get new.

-- Scott Walton (walton@ll.mit.edu), May 13, 2002.

Give it a shot. The stuff stores well in glass bottles. I'm using some vintage chems from the 1950s that are still good. Obviously, don't develop anything important until you develop some confidence in the soup first!

-- Conrad Hoffman (choffman@rpa.net), May 13, 2002.