stick agitator in paterson system 4

[lung_chan]

<p>Hi all,</p>

<p>I just bought a used paterson system 4 tank, and the stick agitator is missing. Does it matter? I want to develop my own slides.<br>

Please let me know if the stick if important or not.<br>

The seller is offering me to return back if I don't like it.</p>

<p>Thank you very much</p>

[jim_gardner4]

<p>If it is water tight (which most of them are not) you could turn over and round instead of using the stick. I now mainly use stainless Hewes tanks after getting uneven development when only using the stick on Paterson tanks. If you can put up with the leakage I would recommend turning over/ round like a figure 8 any way and not using the stick.</p>

[bill_clark___minnetonka_mi]

<p>Hope this helps you:<br>

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/316843-REG/Paterson_SPTP109_Film_Tank_Agitator_.html</p>

[lung_chan]

<p>I pour water in it, and only few drops are coming out.<br>

So the tank don't need the stick, I just have to turn it like a 8 figure?<br>

Thank you</p>

[giverin]

<p>Yeah, you can agitate by inversion as suggested but if you wanted to use rotary agitation, you could easily use a wooden dowel or rod with a slot cut in it.</p>

 

[frank.schifano]

<p>I don't use inversion with the Paterson tanks. The stick agitator works fine. The trick to using it is not to be too gentle about it. Development is always even if your agitation is agressive enough. But yu can use inversion just as well, and some people prefer it. The tank is not useless without the stick, but it sure is nice to have.</p>

[lung_chan]

<p>Tonight I will go someone else processing kit. If the second kit fits me better than I return it this one. I'm trying to process some slides. and the other person has a tank made of stainless, I read somewhere it is better for slides, because the heat transfer is easier. Anyway I keep you guys informed, you all been very helpful.</p>

<p>thank you</p>

[frank.schifano]

<p>The whole business with heat transfer is a wash. Plastic tanks take a little longer to come up to temperature, but once there tend to hold the temperature longer. Stainless steel tanks conduct heat very easily, so they warm up fast in a water bath, but once you take them out of the water bath, tend to cool down quickly as well. I keep my tanks, both plastic and steel, in a tempered water bath between agitation cycles, so the net effect is nil.</p>

[lung_chan]

<p>I will keep the tank and the kit. The other seller sell the kit to someone else, first come first serve. Too bad for me.</p>

<p>I will keep posting for my first slides.</p>

[christer_almqvist2]

<p>I do not use the stick for development, but I use it for stop and fix. The latter two are processes that need to be 100 per cent complete. Overstop and overfix are theoretically possible, in practice not. Development is different, over development will impair the quality of the negatives</p>

<p>I have made a stick test. Shot a whole 36 exposure 35 mm film, grey card and all shots identically exposed. Then I developed using the stick to agitate, 30 secs initiially, then 4 turns every full minute. I measured the densities at the beginning of the film (located near the centre of reel when developing) and at the end of the film (located near the outside of reel when developing). The densities at the end of the film were so much higher than those at the beginning of the film that I stopped using the stick to agitate during development.</p>

<p>The reason for the difference in densities is of course that the portion of the film near the centre moves much less than the portion of the film away from the centre.</p>

[giverin]

<p>Christer, that is very interesting. I used to agitate by inversion but latterly I started rotary agitation. The results of your experiment will perhaps surprise some people but I think you would have to repeat the experiment using the inversion method and compare the two results before reaching any meaningful conclusion.</p>

[christer_almqvist2]

<p>Paul,</p>

<p>thanks for your comment. You have a point there. I shall try that with the first and last frame of a film sometime soon. And I'll post the result.</p>

[lex_jenkins]

<p>Theoretically, Christer's observation makes sense. In actually practice I haven't observed significant variations in densities. But that may be because the plastic tank/reel system I use, a no-name Spanish set, cams the reels up and down along with the rotary motion, which may contribute to more even agitation. I haven't used the older Paterson sets that accommodate rotary agitation and don't know whether the reels are cammed up and down. My 5-reel Paterson tank doesn't accommodate rotary agitation as far as I can tell, but I don't use it for film processing anyway. I mostly use stainless tanks/reels.</p>

[lung_chan]

<p>so what you guys are saying is for some of you, don't use the stick agitator. I'll be better off without it.</p>

 

[bill_clark___minnetonka_mi]

<p>I use the stick agitator. Works for me. I even use it for the Pyro developers I use like WD2D+ that require a fair amount of agitation or else you could get agitated by the results!</p>

[chris_waller]

<p>I've always used the inversion method - I have a darkroom drawer full of unused twirlers.</p>

[frank.schifano]

<p>Well, I can see where using the stick can be a problem IF, and this is a big one, you are too gentle with it. I am not at all gentle about it. I agitate for 5 seconds, each thirty seconds and in that five seconds I do 5 to 6 complete back and forth motions. Some of my plastic tanks have that cam and ramp setup and some don't. It doesn't make any difference with my agitation technique. It might if I were more gentle. Works ok with tanks that hold up to 2 35mm reels or 1 120 reel. Anything larger and inversion agitation works better simply because there's too much mass to get moving in too short at time.</p>

[giverin]

<p>Frank, you talk about the agitation being too gentle but I've found that with my Paterson tank, I can't agitate too quickly because the stick engages in the reel spindle but that spindle is only a tight fit in the reel and when you try and agitate too hard you can feel the reel slipping on the spindle.<br>

I used to agitate by inversion but I've tried rotary inversion for the past couple of months. I'll probably go back to inversion. My tank doesn't leak that much. Oddly enough its the fixer that seems to provoke a few drips. Its obviously more viscous than the developer and stop.</p>

 

[frank.schifano]

<p>Paul, do you have the clip that fits around the spindle, over the reel. This part often goes missing, and helps to hold the reel in place. If you don't have it, I'd really not recommend inversion agitation at all since the reel will tend to slide up the spindle leaving the reel only partly submerged. There is an alternative, and one that works better than the clip. Wrap a rubber band fairly tightly around the spindle, and hard up against the top of the reel. The reel won't creep and it won't slip either.</p>

[giverin]

<p>Hi Frank, the clip is still there. I guess I'm just a bit too enthuisiastic with my twirling. As I said earlier, I did start off with inversion agitation and I never experienced problems. Its only a single tank and there is always 300ml of developer so its always fully submenrged.</p>

 

[clay2]

<p>I have an old tank that uses a thermomoter<br>

on the agitation stick. The tank is not light-tight without it inserted.<br>

Best regards,<br>

/Clay</p>