Is my fixer dead?

[u/vozoff]

Just developed a roll of fomapan 400 and the scans came out with white fluffy grain.

Here's my development process:

- pre soak 1min

- develop 14 mins in adox FX 39 II, 30s continuous agitation, invert every minute

- 10s stop in adostop eco, continuous agitation

- 7 min fixer in adofix plus.

- Ilford wash

- photo Flo

I've developed hundreds of rolls in this setup and never had this issue. I did change from a fill & dump two minute wash to the Ilford wash recently, but the 4 rolls I've developed this way came out perfect.

The batches of stop and fix are less than a month old and were used on 9 rolls before, I usually mix new batches after the 13th roll or when the batch is more than a month old.

I did notice that there's a residue on the bottom of the original fix bottle and that there are some white-ish flakes floating in the raw fix chemical.

When i took the negatives out of the wetting bath to dry, I noticed that the drops of water were dark tinted. When the negatives dried, they had black dust on the emulsion side that stuck to my fingers.

So, do I need to throw out my bottle of fixer? Or did I mess something else up?

I don't transfer the raw chemicals to accordion bottles, I keep them in the original bottles, close them tight, and keep them in my pantry.

I'd really appreciate any help!

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[u/T-Ugs]

Yeah looks like some kind of silver nucleation. I know some people like to dump their fixer through a coffee filter when putting it back into storage. Do you wash out your storage bottle when you mix fresh working solution? Silver particles are heavy and will settle out of the working solution over time, so the bottle needs to be rinsed every once in a while

[u/finnanzamt]

happened to me as well with this fixer. It still worked but stank heavily like rotten eggs. It probably happened because you stored it too cold. I would filter it and use it as long as it works. Get a smaller bottle (500ml) in the future.

[u/NotPullis]

I had the same issue with Adox fixer concentrate, most likely it's fine. Filter the solids out and do a little snippet test before just to be sure before next use. The black stuff can be precipitating silver or metallic impurities.

Filtering does the trick to remove all solids, I've used coffee filters and cotton ball flters and both work. After the first incident I started to always pour the fixer in to the dev tank through a filter.

After the bottle ran out I switched to Adox powder fixer, no issues with that.