Steel reels.. Bleh!

[steve salmons]

<p>I'm coming to this thread a bit late but I just thought I would add my experience. I mainly process 120 rolls and I found my existing Paterson spirals were causing problems with film sticking at mid load. After one or two films being creased on loading I invested in a couple of Hewes 120 reels which I use inside my existing Paterson dev tanks.<br>

Early experiences were not good. I always load my tanks in a changing bag and develop my rolls over the kitchen sink. I found the loading procedure difficult and the lack of space inside the changing bag compounded the problem. However after a couple of wrecked films I did as suggested and practised in daylight with dummy film, eyes open, then eyes shut, then in bag until I was getting it right all the time. More importantly I developed a "feel" for when it was sitting correctly on the spiral. In addition, when using a changing bag, I find it much easier if you strip the backing paper off the film completely before starting to load onto the spiral.<br>

I do insert the film into the clip and find the front edge of the clip to be a useful guide to ensuring that the film is lying perfectly square inside the reel. Coincidentally the switch to SS reels coupled with changing my agitation technique to inversion rather than rotation, seems to have eliminated the banding problem I was getting on the uniform highlight areas in some of the scans from my negatives.</p>