[Noisebridge-discuss] Chemistry at Noisebridge

[Mark Cohen]

I think as a project, that's a great idea! 

A thought or two might complicate things :)

The amount of silver that you will reclaim with that is very little, it takes multiple cycles to get enough to scrape off and reclaim. In the mean time, you will have fixer sitting in a bucket.... For weeks or months. :) I don't know about you, but I'd prefer not to smell fixer all the time. Its the one chemical that I always notice on my hands and clothes after processing.. for hours :)  They even used to make special soap that you can use to get the fixer smell off you. 

For what its worth, I used to mix my own pyro and develop film/paper by hand in the crap (brown fingers and all) (Pyrogallol and Pyro Metol, and Hydroquinone based) and I still smelled the fixer on my hands :)

Here is a decent post about electrolytic silver recovery : http://www.pneac.org/sheets/all/silver.cfm

When I worked as a pro darkroom tech (b/w paper, film and color transparency development and printing) we used to use silver reclamation. As I recall, even with all of the film and paper fixer as well as bleach-fix we put through there, we ran it for days on each batch and barely pulled out any silver sludge. As films improve (t-grain) the major design decision was for the companies to use less silver in the materials. This is why they pushed so hard on C-41 monochromatic films like T400CN and Ilford XP2.

On a side note, if you have a Polaroid SX70 or a 600, you might want to dust it off, the Impossible Project has done the Impossible :) They're making and selling Polaroid film again. 

I can't wait for the 59! :)

Mark


On Mar 25, 2010, at 7:14 PM, Meredith L. Patterson wrote:

> Mark Cohen wrote:
>> the Harvey Milk Photo center used to take used fixer and have it dealt with properly (removed the silver 
> 
> Audrey and I had been kicking around the idea of electrolytically removing the silver from used fixer, for, you know, whatever anyone might want blobs of silver for.
> 
> --mlp

Mark Cohen
markc at binaryfaith.com

Science is a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.
-Carl Sagan, 1996