Developing a film by myself

So...today I received a very nice gift. The guys I work with chipped in and bought me a home developing kit as a b-day gift.
I own a Pentacon six ( that is an analog medium format camera). As you know, in our times, it’s kinda hard to go back to analog photography. Developing, scanning is expensive and not found on every corner.
I always wanted to process my own roll of film. I knew a little about the process but haven’t tried it.

Anyway, as soon as I got home, I did a rapid fire unboxing 😂, took out everything that came with the kit, grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and started browsing the web for the steps required to develop a roll of film.
So, apparently developing is quite a precise process that involves temperatures, motion, and a somewhat fixed amount of time.
The roll of film is an Ilford Delta 400 ( 400 is the speed of film, meaning ISO). I looked on Ilford’s website for my type of film and the developing time was 8 min at 27 degrees Celsius.
Now came the hardest part, the darkroom, which in my case was my bathroom.
The kit came with a Paterson developing tank wich is a darkroom with a hole so you can pour in different liquids.

Inside there is a winding spool for film. So, in pitch black environment you take your undeveloped roll of film and slowly winding it on to the spool. After the winding is complete, put the lid on top and you can turn on the lights.
Well, this process is easier said than done. It took me a few dozen tries and a good 40 min or so to get that done.
Ok, now for the chemicals.
First you need a developing solution. Remember 27 degrees C? I turned on the hot water tap and from time to time I took a temperature reading and adjusted the warm/cold water until I reached the required temp. Poured the developing solution into the warm water, stirred vigorously and then poured it in the Paterson tank.
While developing you need to agitate the tank for 10 sec on every minute for 8:30 minutes.
While the film was developing I prepared the stop bath. Stop bath does exactly as the name implies. Stops the developing process.
After the developing time has passed, i removed the solution from the tank for further use and poured in the stop bath.
I then agitated the tank for another...10-15 sec.
At this time the smell of chemicals was pretty strong and a slight headache was starting to appear.
After the stop bath was removed from the tank I needed the fixer solution. A fixer solution finalises the developing process, permanently fixing the image to the film.
It required 20 degrees water temperature and 10 sec agitation at every minute for 4 minutes.
After it was done, I removed the fixer and poured clean water a few times to rinse the film.
Now the film is ready to see the light of day. I was so excited to see the result, I can’t put into words.
I opened the tank, took the spooler out, and hang the film to dry.
A 120 roll of film has only 12 frames on it so the margin for error is slim to none.
From 12 images I got...5.
The first and last are completely ruined and the ones from the middle are or so underexposed that nothing came out or I messed up in the developing process.
All in all I’m very pleased with the whole process and the fact that I managed to get 5 frames is amazing.
Now, the next step will be scanning them, inverting them and only then I can see the images.
I didn’t take any photo during the process because I was pretty excited and was against the clock with all the chemicals.
I took a final photo as the film was hung to dry.

So excited to see the scanned negatives😁
I’ll post them here regardless of how they came out.
Thanks for reading!