Hello there
I just developed two black and white film rolls. That was a painful experience, because of my bad choice of film:
👿 The Lucky SHD400 is too thin, curling on itself like crazy, slipping on the reel.
🫤 The Lomography earl grey 100 is a bit thicker, better catch on reel’s sides and locking ball.
I wish next rolls will be easier to feed on the reel, any advices ?
Until now nothing beats the Kikipan 320. But it’s not produced anymore.
Asking AI seems only to praise most expensive films, not sure if it is true or biased.
Also I tired asking on the mastodon and associated platform first with not much luck.
Hopefully lemmy is better suited for that kind of open question ?
Many people seems to praise metal reels like you do, I will buy one at some point but I can’t imagine loading a soft or curly film without the help of a ball bearing …?
Like what prevents it to slip backwards ? How to avoid touching the negative surface with my hands…
(I wear vinyl gloves in the dark chamber to avoid sweat and figerprints)
You hold the film on the edges and let it slip through while winding it on the reel. There’s a bunch of videos that show the process. It’s pretty straight forward.
As with everything: pratice first until you can literally do it blindly.
I don’t wear any gloves. I start with clean hands and whatever tiny fingerprint-fragment might get onto anything, will be dissolved multiple times by the chemicals anyway :-)
Think about a metal tape measure. Its a long piece of floppy metal, but can stand nearly straight when held horizontally for many feet (or CM). Its because the metal is curved. When loading the film you do the same them. You hold the film at the edges and squeeze it a bit so it has that same curve as a tape measure. The metal reel is slightly narrower than 35mm film so the film goes in easy when curved, but when it gets to the binding point in the reel it expands out becoming wider, where it gets “caught” by the edge of the wire reel.