Rushton: great article. I posted on the site, but wanted to encourage all who have looked at DIY record cleaning to look at what you put together. I really liked the motor set up for the records to be turned in the bath. Your experience is very similar to mine on the key points of the process. Clean water, good Ultrasonic bath with enough energy to create the bubbles, right temperature (needs to be warm not boiling hot) and a slow turn in the bath were the key performance metrics for me. Also the point about needing a small amount of isopropyl alcohol was right on point. Big, big difference with versus without. However, too much can cause a lot of odor issues and could result in a fire as the isopropyl alcohol evaporates in the bath. Finally a good dispersant like tergitol (i use triton ) that doesn't produce too much foam. Nice article!
Rushton's DIY approach to ultrasonic record cleaning published by Positive Feedback
Over the past several months I’ve invested a fair amount of time exploring ultrasonic cleaning because I’ve fallen way too far behind in my record cleaning. With over 6000 LPs, I needed a faster way to clean than my trusted multi-step manual wet/vac cleaning process. That manual process got the best results I’ve ever found, but I was not keeping up with my collection and it is just painful to me to play a record that I’ve not cleaned.
In exploring ultrasonic cleaning, my hope was to find that I could complete multiple LPs in a single US cleaning cycle and greatly speed up my rate of cleaning records. My goals were to FIRST do no harm and then SECOND see how close I could get to the results of my manual cleaning regimen.
My past experiences with ultrasonic cleaning demonstrations were completely underwhelming. What I heard did not approach the excellence I was achieving with my multi-step wet/vac cleaning regimen.
What I’ve learned, and now apply in my new ultrasonic cleaning regimen, are multiple elements to the cleaning process that must be used in combination to achieve the best possible results. And these results have far exceeded my expectations.
I’d thought of posting here on Audiogon the summary of what I’ve learned and am now applying as my new record cleaning regimen, but the inability to post images and to apply formatting here caused me to send my summary to David Robinson at Positive Feedback who has graciously published my comments as a guest essay. Please read that essay, and then come back here to Audiogon with comments and to share your experiences:
http://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/rushton-paul-diy-approach-ultrasonic-cleaning-lps/
I look forward to some further discussion and sharing of experiences.
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