Good luck! We'll see how good we both are at guessing.(posted 8919 days ago)I haven't used TX in years; however, I did try D-23 with HP5 a couple of years ago. D-23 1:1 9'30"/68F EI 250 worked ok with HP5 although it was a tad flat and should've gone to maybe 11'.
But it didn't show me anything real spiffy. It worked, acutance wasn't all that wonderful, grain wasn't very fine and there's the speed loss.
Since you have some ingredients and are playing with developers...
D-76H
Water 750ml 125F
Metol 2.5g
Sodium sulfite 100g
Borax (20 Mule Team) 2g
Water to make 1.0L
This is simply the classic D-76 formula with a little more metol and no hydroquinone; use as you would ordinary Kodak D-76. 1:1 for 13'/68F works for HP5+ EI 400.
Also, I've found it to be worthwhile using distilled water to make developers. Sometimes a calcium sludge will form in developers that don't have the assorted sequestering agents that are in commercial developers that make them suitable for mixing with tap water.
I just went through a short Pyro (PMK+/Leban) tryout with HP5.
While I see how it'd be great for platinum printers or a heroic-measures contraction when faced with a very high-contrast scene, I didn't find it useful for general photography and printing on silver VC paper. Compared to D-76H, it gave negs that were significantly grainier, not particularly sharp, more than a stop slower and printed on VC paper with very low highlight contrast.
That it could hold a couple stops more highlight range didn't really matter; the light tones still looked like muck. I can get that range or more with other developers and not have the highlights block up to such low contrast.
Note that this was PMK+, which is intended for rotary agitation; plain PMK may perform differently.
Also, the stained negs were difficult to make sense out of with a densitometer. While the optical (b&w) channel read low (compared to "normal"), the blue channel read really high but the negs printed on VC paper close to what the optical curve indicated. Or iow, on VC paper the stain wasn't contributing printing density so much as yellow-green (low contrast) filtration.
Phil Davis has speculated that the useful curve shape is somewhere about midway between the two, but how it'll print depends on the paper used etc.