[LargeFormat] Cabin fever has set in.

[Paul and Paula Butzi]

> 1.     You walk into the darkroom cold with a headache and 6 DD's filled
> with colour neg - result of a studio shoot. How much time until you have the
> 12 wet negs pegged up to dry and can leave the darkroom.

I can't comment directly on this but I can offer my experience with processing
large amounts of 4x5 film on a Jobo cpp-2 in the 3010 expert drums.

My Jobo usually lives empty under the darkroom sink.


1 min    get out Jobo, place in sink, close drain valve
5 min    fill water bath with water at 75F from temp controlled faucet

Usually I'm attending to other tasks (e.g. sorting film by development)
when the water bath is filling.

.5 min    mix one liter of Tmax-RS 1+9 in developer bottle
.5 min    mix one liter of stop
.5 min    mix one liter of fix
.5 min    mix one liter of wash aid

at this point the water bath is full and the unit is close to temp.
Chems are mixed with tempered water from the Hass intellifaucet
so they're pretty much already at temp.

2 min    Load a 3010 tank with film. 

at this point I'm ready to go.  I sometimes go have a cup of tea while
the developer gets to exactly the right temp.

a run processing film looks like this:

2 min    water pre-soak
8 to 16 minutes    developer
1 min    stop
5 min    fix
2 min    wash aid
1 min    short wash

I then take the drum off the Jobo, pop the next drum on, and start
the next run.  I load the next run during the developer phase.

The processed but unwashed film goes into the film washer.  I take it
out, give it a dip in Edwal LFN, and hang it on the drying line during
the next run of film.

This works out to about 3 runs of film/hour, or 30 sheets/hour.  I can
keep it up for a couple of hours but then need to take a sanity break.

The big win is that because the Jobo does all the agitation and you
only need to intervene to change from one chemical to another, you
can be doing things like cataloging film that's dry, sleeving it, etc.
instead of standing in the dark.  An ATL would make it even better,
since you just push the button and walk away, and come back when
it's done.

You can wash film in the tank on the Jobo but adding a ten minute
wash in the Jobo cuts the throughput to two runs/hour, a pretty big
hit.

Working this way, I can generally drill through the backlog of film
from a one week trip in one or two days.

-Paul