debianlinux
Well-Known Member
Pretty sure the discussion at AK takes twice as long to read.
Record cleaning - what's your method?
- Thread starter lazylistener
- Start date
AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
Interesting until it became a ultrasonic discussion between 2 panelists for too long. But, they did touch on some very basic cleaning rules that everyone should follow
Dylanfan253
Active Member
This was great to watch they brought up my problem also I had started using tergikleen and that’s one thing all agreed you shouldn’t use. Still glad to have a cavitation bath though.
Dylanfan253
Active Member
I’m not hip to this but I’m assuming they are really good at pressing records or really bad
AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
They're hit or miss...............more miss though and they press a lot of albums (noise, warps), hang around long enough and you'll see it mentioned, lol
trickyseven
Well-Known Member
Lol I caught that too..............oddly enough, one of the comment that stuck in my head was "...........GZ makes their own PVC pellets"
Dylanfan253
Active Member
Depending on how bad the warp on a new record and how much it cost I usually just flatten warped records but I’ve bought way more records over the last ten months then anyone should and probably 200-300 have been new and I would say maybe 5-10 percent of them are truly flat.
Dylanfan253
Active Member
I feel like an idiot for using tergitol though it was literally the one thing they all agreed on was not to use it lol
AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
But now you know
jaycee
Well-Known Member
I use tergitol and it is "toxic". It's a carcinogen, but that doesn't mean that it's bad to clean vinyl records with. The statement about it eating through machine components I can't speak to but it seems a bit outrageous. The chemical needs to be diluted appropriately. It needs to be used safely, but it probably doesn't damage records. I've never noticed an issue. The chemical needs to be rinsed off after cleaning.
Perhaps it's bad for an ultrasonic machine. Although I don't know why that would be. Perhaps there's a safer and just as good alternative, but professional archivists, people who are trained and educated in the discipline of archiving, use it so I trust it.
The implication from the ultrasonic dude that the Smithsonian doesn't know what it's doing is a laughable claim.
Like I said, I understand the toxic argument but I've seen no evidence that the surfactant tergitol damages records.
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jaycee
Well-Known Member
I use the water soluble version of this
www.talasonline.com
I dilute it 1000 to 1. I spray it on the surface of the vinyl, label is protected, I spread it with a paint edger (very soft) rotating around the record 5-10 times in each direction, I repeat on the second side. I rinse with distilled water and vacuum.
I wouldn't reccomend what I do for most people. It's essentially the same as a record cleaning machine but more manual.
Tergitol Surfactant
Tergitol 15-S-3, and Tergitol 15-S-9 Surfactants are nonionic surfactant which are ideally suited for many cleaning applications. The S-3 is oil soluble, and the S-9 is water soluble. This product is a mixture of linear secondary alcohols reacted with ethylene oxide. The general formula is...
www.talasonline.com
I dilute it 1000 to 1. I spray it on the surface of the vinyl, label is protected, I spread it with a paint edger (very soft) rotating around the record 5-10 times in each direction, I repeat on the second side. I rinse with distilled water and vacuum.
I wouldn't reccomend what I do for most people. It's essentially the same as a record cleaning machine but more manual.
jaycee
Well-Known Member
Here is the SDS on tergitol.
It does interact with copper and zinc so any components in a machine that are brass or have a zinc-alloy coating could degrade.
Also why I'm pro a rinsing step.
It does interact with copper and zinc so any components in a machine that are brass or have a zinc-alloy coating could degrade.
Also why I'm pro a rinsing step.
AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
Like many things, sometimes it's more about human "error" than it is the solution or whatever.......not insinuating you did anything wrong @Dylanfan253, just that sometimes things aren't used as they should be............but, that being said, while I'm sure @jaycee system works great, I would, personally, go with another solution that might be safer. Again........not that anyone's way of doing things is wrong
jaycee
Well-Known Member
Like many things, sometimes it's more about human "error" than it is the solution or whatever.......not insinuating you did anything wrong @Dylanfan253, just that sometimes things aren't used as they should be............but, that being said, while I'm sure @jaycee system works great, I would, personally, go with another solution that might be safer. Again........not that anyone's way of doing things is wrong
Couldn't agree more.
I have a background in chemistry... I'm a scientist - not that you need to be, but the manual things I do work for me. I'll simplify to a machine at some point but I just don't want to invest in it yet and I like the manual nature of what I do.
Most people shouldn't bother with mixing their own solutions, but they should pay attention to what's in them and be able to google the safety data sheet for the chemicals involved. None of these things are something you want to bath in.
I'm curious about the cavitation method. I think it's worth doing from a science perspective, but I doubt the claims of the person on that panel are as scientifically sound as they were presented.
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AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
I gotta agree with ya on the one panel member, it came across more like an info-mercial. I'm sure the science is there, just presented in his own way.
zombie.modernist
Well-Known Member
I thought this panel was the best unintentional comedy of the week! He's quite the hustler, any opening he turned into a sales spiel. And the reactions from Matt at VPI are pretty funny too. Not a scientist myself but Kirmuss does seems to veer really heavily into the pseudo-science realm for my liking, especially since he claims the rest of the manufactures are wrong. I can see why some of the others on the stage didn't like his combative approach.
jaycee
Well-Known Member
For sure, cavitation equipment is used to clean things in the laboratory / medical environments amongst others. Making heated water molecules move very fast is useful for cleaning things, but the arguments about getting water further into the grooves seem a bit far fetched to me. I don't know that they're false, but it doesn't make a ton of sense that their formula is driving the water further in. I assume the machine helps water molecules move further into the grooves by making them vibrate at a higher frequency... but I'm just another old dude making stuff up with too much time on their hands.
I appreciated the conversation, but I think that the conversation wasn't directed enough to be useful to most people. If the point was to try to bring clarification about all of the misinformation out there the panel didn't do a great job.
My takeaways
1. Clean your records (Duh) / Replace your inner sleeves.
2. Don't use alcohol based products (If possible)
3. Cleaning products are chemicals (Be careful)
4. Vacuum machines work and are pretty simple to use.
5. Cavitation might be the way forward... we'll see
jaycee
Well-Known Member
I mean the best salespeople believe in what they're selling, but when they present it as both science and infallible it's probably neither
trickyseven
Well-Known Member
That's the best way to describe it, "unintentional comedy". He was also way into name dropping: "when we worked with the library of congress...". Also his slides were terrible.
I agree Matt was hilarious to watch.