Thanks to all for the response. I'll address most of the issues in this thread by sharing the results of the tests I did last night:(posted 8515 days ago)Pre-soak... I did four strips of 135 HP5+ in D76 1:1 at 20 degrees for the ilford- recommended 11 minutes as a starting point. Two of these strips I pre-soaked and two I did not. The densities of all strips looked ok, however there was inconsistancy in the two pre-soaked strips. Both strips seemed to blow out the highlights a bit, one worse than the other. The two non-presoaked rolls came out pretty close to ideal. My conclusion was that the blown-out highlight problem could probably be solved by altering the development times, but there's just no reason to presoak, adding an extra step and 5 minutes, and worrying about the inconsistancy, when the non-presoaked film processed so well.
1:1, stock, or 1:3- Because the recommended time for HP5+ in D76 1:1 came out so well, I decided to keep the processing times consistent with what Ilford recommends for stock, and 1:3 dilutions...7.5 and 22 minutes, respectively. Again, I was pleasently surprised at how close these times are to ideal for my darkroom setup. I developed one strip each in the latter mentioned dilutions, and each strip printed almost identical. The 1:1 and 1:3 dilutions were almost duplicates of one another...1:0 difference was subtle, but there. Because the results were so close, I decided to go with 1:1 for the following reasons: 1) Not comfortable with development times approaching 5 minutes with no gain in apparent sharpness. 2) The problem mentioned in the original post regarding amount of stock solution per roll(see below).
Fine-tuning development time... Because the 11 minute Ilford rec. was close, I chose to develop another 4 test strips in the following increments: 1) 8 minutes 2) 10 minutes 3)12 minutes 4)14 minutes. Again, these strips were all done in 1:1 D76 at 20 degrees. 8x10 enlargments of each strip were made using diffusion enlarger(cold light). The 8 minute strip printed a bit too flat. The 10, 11, and 12 minutes strips were close...the 14 minute strip showing a bit too much contrast on the final print. The 11 and 12 minute strips were almost non-discearnable, and the 10 minute strip seemed to print the best.
Results: Ilford's suggested time(11 minutes) for HP5+ in D76 at 20 degrees were just about right on for my setup. The ideal development was almost 10 percent lower than this recommended time, coming close to Jobo's suggestion to decrease development time 15 percent (from times given for inversion) for rotary processing. As for the dilutions, I added about 60 ml more than Jobo's recommended volume for the 1520 tank. This gave me 130ml stock D76, 130ml water...or 65ml per roll of 135 film. It should be noted that the film was not an entire 24 or 36 exposure roll...the test strips were apporoximately 5 frames long, coming from the same stock of 100ft roll HP5+. One more test will be needed for a full roll at 65ml stock before processing any real images.
Thanks again to all who contributed. Hopefully these results will be of interest and aid to anyone following this thread.