how to clean your re re rekkids

so

i've been face palming a lot lately because when i want to put on records, because my room is very dusty, the records just soak up that dust even when properly stored in sleeves. i bought a cleaner, i use it, it has some alcohol in it but it doesn't dry fast enough so dust falls on it and then sticks when it drys causing even more problems. i recently found an article it said to dust your record first and then apply a small ammount of rubbing alcohol directly to the record and wipe circular with a flannel cloth. boy does it work! the record dries super fast, wave it around to dry it off and a minute later you can put it on the platter to play.

i just thought i'd share in hope that this might help someone...

yep, i bought a spray bottle of alcohol based record cleaner recently and it works really well. cleaned up my copy of spirit of eden by talk talk so that it was actually playable!

I've also heard de-static guns are good (for static of course). anyone ever used one of these? havent wanted to spend the cash but it would def help a few of my records

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The safe formula is the same as archival commercial preparations, except that you are mixing it yourself and therefore it costs you a fraction of the price of ready mixed. It can be used for both hand and vacuum cleaning. It is a 25 percent solution of isopropyl alcohol in water, with a drop of surfacant. Ethyl alcohol, sometimes applied to records in the form of vodka is more damaging to vinyl than is isopropyl. Use it only in an absolute pinch.

 

Drugstore isopropyl contains too many impurities to qualify it for record cleaning. Use technical or lab-grade isopropyl, which is extremely pure. Reagent grade is unnecessary and far more expensive. Water should be steam distilled, triple de-ionized. Both of these are readily available at a chemical supply house, which should sell them to you in pint and gallon sizes.

 

You also need to add a drop of surfacant, or wetting agent, to reduce the surface tension of the water so the formula can penetrate down into the grooves. Very high frequency grooves, in the range of 15 kHz, can be as small as four millionths of an inch, according to Wald Davies of LAST. Though alcohol itself helps somewhat, you still need a wetting agent. Two excellent and safe choices are Triton X-114 from Rohm-Haas and Monolan 2000 from Diamond Shamrock. Both of these are nontoxic - but don't take them internally - and biodegradable. Very importantly, they leave behind no residue on the record. They are harmless in these small amounts to record vinyl and, as far as is known, to any of the conceivable by-products and impurities likely to be found in record vinyl.

 

Kodak's Kodaflow is sometimes recommended as a wetting agent. Do *not* use this as it contains chemicals in addition to surfacants that would leave behind residues bad for both record and stylus. Kodak recommends against this application.

This describes pretty much the ideal solution to use - pure alcohol is a little too strong, best to dilute with deionized water, with a few drops of surfactant such as those described above.

Microfibre cloths are available everywhere and are by far the best to use, they leave no marks at all on the record and do a really great cleaning job, I wouldn't use anything else short of a full-on vacuum cleaning machine.

I don't own much vinyl myself, but I've heard the pva method works well.

http://www.cratekings.com/clean-records-with-wood-glue-aka-the-vinyl-facelift/