Vinyl cleaning with woodglue???

By the way, Steve, what did that 1% end up doing?  (stayed stuck on, I'm assuming)

That's Graeme's 1%, not mine! I'm the coward, remember...

By the way, Steve, what did that 1% end up doing?  (stayed stuck on, I'm assuming)

That's Graeme's 1%, not mine! I'm the coward, remember...

  You know I didn't really mean it.

Yes the 1% remained on the record.  Little bits of it stuck in the groove. 

Tell me more about the Monks system.  And what your second choice would be for fewer $$$.

You can read a little about it here - http://www.keithmonks-rcm.co.uk/index.htm

It really is the bees knees for cleaning records, but it's not cheap.  The Loricraft is in the same league - http://www.loricraft.com/prc2.html - but also the same price bracket .  There is an ex-demo machine available ( http://loricraftinternetshop.co.uk/index.html?_ret_=return ) which is a good deal.

Cheaper optios are the Nitty Gritty - http://www.nittygrittyinc.com/index.html , VPI - http://www.vpiindustries.com/products_cleaning.htm - and the Moth - http://www.britishaudio.co.uk/rcm.htm , but they really are not as good as the more expensive machines.  A net search will throw up some other models, but they're all pretty much the same animal.  There's a German built version of the Monks which is very nice and beautifully engineered (as you would expect from the Krauts) but you need a second mortgage to buy one !

You could build your own.  Check the archives, somewhere in there you should find a description of a machine that Andrew Rose (one of our forum members) describes how he did it, for not a lot of money.

One thing I would stress is that it is perfectly possible to clean records well by hand - but it does take longer and the process is not as repeatable as when using a machine.  This last point is important if you intend to experiment with different cleaning chemistries.  I did a lot of this and it made it much easier to compare different chemitries.  I spent a long time developing my own, which compare very favourably to those available commercially.  If youare not interested in this aspect, then I would suggest you go for the system developed by Duane Goldman - http://www.discdoc.com/ .

It is possible to use PVA without leaving some of it in the grooves. You mainly need to get a deep enough pool of it spread over the disk so there are no thin spots to tear loose. I suppose even that can’t guarantee complete success, but it makes it much more likely.

PVA in powder form is much cheaper than any glue I’ve seen. The first site I found offering it was for about $12/pound, less for larger quantities. You have to cook your own solution if you buy it this way, kind of like making pudding as I already mentioned: heat slowly while stirring. It is reusable by reheating and adding more alcohol and water. Eventually it would probably hold too much dirt to be worth reprocessing, but the cost would be much less than any commercially available glue.

This way you also would not have the polyvinyl acetate that is frequently mixed with it in glue and which, in my view, makes it less pleasant to work with for this task. It is a thinner solution than any glue I’ve ever used, perhaps due to the alcohol, which may make it more likely to reach the bottom of the grooves.

I believe the least expensive vacuum cleaning machine (aside from making your own) is the EV-1 from KAB. You use your own vacuum cleaner.
http://www.kabusa.com/
Its processing  may be less exactly repeatable than that of the Monks and some other  machines; nothing about its use is automated, so user performance is a (un)constant factor. However, if there is evidence that any of the more expensive machines actually does a better job, I would be quite interested in seeing it.

However, if there is evidence that any of the more expensive machines actually does a better job, I would be quite interested in seeing it.

What do you mean by 'evidence'?  The Monks and (latterly) the Loricraft are the machines of choice of all the major archival centres, broadcast stations (although their use of records is rapidly diminishing, of course) museums, etc. in the world.   That really should be evidence enough - most of these guys are short of money and they wouldn't shell out the sort of dosh these machines cost if they thought they could get away with something cheaper.

The biggest advantage of their design is the vacuum extraction system.  All the other mechines use a 'wand' that tries to pull all the cleaning fluid off the entire diameter of the disk. The Monks and the Loricraft use a system, orginally designed by Percy Wilson, where  the suction area is only a few grooves wide and the the extraction nozzle is prevented from contacting the disk by a thread of material that is continuously replaced.  This latter also helps to remove dirt (judging by its colour after passing through the extraction nozzle).

I've used a VPI HW-17 and a Nitty Gritty 1.5 - but I bought a Monks.  I would  have preferred to spend less money, but it really was the best available. 

Incidentally, the HW-17 is endorsed by Michael Fremer - in my view, that should be warning enough!!
 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22614130/

Once upon a time all the best people knew you were better off to be burned at the stake than to have strange ideas running around in your head. What evidence do any of those people or institutions you mentioned have that the Monks, and similar designs, actually produce a cleaner disk?

I’m not saying it isn’t a good machine, and I’m not saying it might not do some better cleaning. I don’t see any logical reason to believe the cleaning part likely, however. I think getting objective, unambiguous evidence that its finished products are any cleaner, or that mine are any dirtier, could be very difficult. If there were any practical way to find out, that would be interesting.

What evidence do any of those people or institutions you mentioned have that the Monks, and similar designs, actually produce a cleaner disk?

I bought one!  To my mind, that is evidence enough.  I'm not the sort of person who spends more money than they have to and I would have been only too pleased to have purchased something half the price.  However, it was patently obvious the Monks did a better job than either of the other machines I had used - all it needs is a pair of ears to know that. 

Basically the other machines (the ones I haven't tried) work on the same broad principle as the VPI and NG, so I had no reason to expect them to do a better job.

I don’t see any logical reason to believe the cleaning part likely...

I gave you one - the vacuum extraction system is much improved over the 'wand' system.

however. I think getting objective, unambiguous evidence that its finished products are any cleaner, or that mine are any dirtier, could be very difficult. If there were any practical way to find out, that would be interesting.

Rather than relying on what other people might say, I prefer to use the 'evidence' of my own ears.

I think getting objective, unambiguous evidence that its finished products are any cleaner, or that mine are any dirtier, could be very difficult. If there were any practical way to find out, that would be interesting.

Actually, it would be quite easy. The only problem is that you are going to need all of the machines present in the same place, and a few typically dirty records.

What you do is to clean a record on one machine, and then clean it again on another, and see if any more detritus is removed. And then you do the same thing the other way around - start with the other machine and see if the second one (that was previously the first one) removes any more. After several goes with different records, it is very likely to become obvious as to whether one machine could consistently remove more muck than the other. Then you have to perm the combinations of different machines you have available in order to rank their cleaning abilities. There would be a few precautions you'd need to take, and a few things you'd need to be consistent about, but in principle it should be possible to rank them.

Whether the end results actually sound any different would be an interesting conjecture - to an extent it would depend upon the reaction of the cleaning process with the grooves, and it would take a microscopic investigation at least to reveal anything of a physical nature that would account for any differences.

But I have to say that on the few occasions in the past that I've had records cleaned with a Keith Monks machine, I've been extremely satisfied with the results in an absolute sense, regardless of what any other machine might be able to achieve.

and a few typically dirty records.

How many do you need? 

and a few typically dirty records.

How many do you need? 

I realise that you probably weren't expecting an answer - well, possibly not a numerical one at any rate - but I think that you'd need to run at least 10 for each machine pair in order to get some repeatable results. The good thing is that these need to be different records, really, with different amounts of crud in the grooves, because that's the only way you can ultimately be sure about the results in a statistical test to establish which combination of approach and cleaning materials is the 'best'.

So for three machines you'd need 30 records, but for a 4 machine comparison on that basis you'd need 60, and 100 for a 5-machine comparison. And you have to analyse all of the results too. I bet you'd be well hacked off by the time you'd finished! And worse than that, you'd then be obliged to retreat all of the records that hadn't been cleaned so effectively in the machine that won the shootout...

Better just to do what Graeme says, and buy the Monks in the first place, I think. Everybody who's tried them (except the other manufacturers, their agents and the people who made poor wallet decisions) says that they are the best.

Steve, I remember enough from my statistics courses to know.

Problem with those machines is that rarely someone has experienced more than 1 of them. So the "Everybody who's tried them (snip) says that they are the best" is statistically suspect. Combine this with the fact that most of those machines go to people that find anything expensive better than something cheaper and the foundation for this claim sinks fast.

I admit I haven't experienced any of those machines and neither studied their working principles.

In principal, measuring how much dirt is removed, averaged over enough disks, should be a valid test, but it would not be easy. I understand that the Monks has a receptacle bottle where the removed fluid is collected. It also uses a piece of thread that must collect some portion of the dirt, regardless of whether or not that is its primary purpose. Like all the others, the Monks is pumping air through itself. Is there any basis to say none of the small particles exits into the atmosphere?

Mine uses a home vacuum cleaner and there’s no separating what came off the carpet from what came off some LPs. Other record cleaning machines that use the same basic cleaning mechanism, but their own vacuum pump, might be easier to interrogate, but not necessarily simple.

It may be possible to collect and analyze how much stuff came off each disk, but that would surely be a difficult and expensive process.

A further consideration on that approach to measurement is that I would never put all the dirt through my machine. My cleaning regime is multi-step, the highly visible surface debris never touches the vacuum machine.

In a commercial operation, where time spent is a big factor in financial success, spending a lot more on equipment that makes operations simpler may be the most valid decision. There is also  a convenience factor in favor of any design that can successfully clean everything in one step, but

those aspects of how the cleaning is done do not mean that the end product is different.

**
Microscopic examination of the surface and grooves is certainly possible.  Several hundred times magnification would be necessary to adequately look for traces of dirt after cleaning. Some experience would be necessary to assure a reasonable interpretation of what is observed. This would require a viewing setup quite different from a normal laboratory microscope; possibly some common industrial approach could be readily adapted.

Under high magnification one does not see a very large area at one time. Any number of real world circumstances could lead to very uneven distribution of muck over the years of an LP’s pre-cleaning existence.  How many sample views of each LP would be required to obtain valid statistical data about its condition?

Then, how would each observation be evaluated to ensure that valid conclusions can be derived from their aggregate? Some kind of numerical conclusion would need to be made for each observation. Of course, if the cleaning results could be seen to be grossly different, a reasonable conclusion might be reached without formal procedures (but unlikely, I think).

**
An evaluation of results by listening could only be valid if done by blind ABX testing. Information about human perception and emotional response is just too well established to put credence in anything less. The reference I provided above speaks to that, but it is not anything that hasn’t been know for a long time.

There is no special sound from playing an LP dirty; it cannot by itself be differentiated from noise originating due to other physical damage. Each LP, often enough any random part of an LP, is more or less unique. A listening evaluation would require at least the 10 disks per machine SteveG suggested, with no information available to the listener about how each sample was treated. One could only come to a valid conclusion by the statistical analysis of enough test results. Only recording the disks, after cleaning on each machine, and listening to the recordings, could provide the control necessary to do the testing.

**
My cleaning process is multi-step and involved. The instructions that came with the vacuum cleaning machine are much simpler; possibly they are just as functional. I’ve gone through an evolutionary process in developing what I now do. It may change in the future.

I’ve tried to evaluate the results of different treatments but the reality is that each LP is quite different from the last one. There is no constant I can use as a reference . I have reasons for everything I do, but I really know that most of it is based on my feelings about what I think should be best rather than anything I know for certain. The one exception to this is the old DiskWasher brush I incorporated into the routine about a year ago.

The visible surface of many thrift store purchases is filthy. I would guess that Graeme probably receives more than a few similar disks from his clients. A preliminary, essentially pressureless, brushing with the damp DiskWasher brush removes just about everything visible -- which is often quite a bit. This makes it markedly easier to keep the other brushes and wiping cloths clean. This is so readily visible and constant that it could not be controversial to any observer. Beliefs about none of the other steps can reasonably be considered truly objective, however.

Nah, soddit. If they're that grubby, take 'em out in the yard and use the pressure washer on them!

If you want an approach that's really going to work stupendously well, then use an ultrasonic cleaner.

The topic was not about grubbyness but about the relative effectiveness of various cleaning methods. My hypothesis is that, for all its all its sensuous mechanical fundamentals, high build quality, and gobs of price tag, the Monk’s results are not different than that which can be achieved with low end vacuum cleaning machines. I made no supposition that it can’t handle heavy dirt.

I’ve read about two attempts to use ultrasonic cleaning. I don’t know that I understand the specifics of the reported problems, but apparently bits of vinyl are liberated along with the dirt, rendering the disk, while possibly quite clean, not very good for music playback. Maybe there is some way to overcome the difficulties, but no one seems to have yet done so.

Some form of vapor degreaser seems like a possibly effective approach, but there might be significant problems with the labels. Also, I don’t know enough about the phase change temperatures of suitable solvents. Reforming the vinyl while cleaning it would not be very popular.

I’ve read about two attempts to use ultrasonic cleaning. I don’t know that I understand the specifics of the reported problems, but apparently bits of vinyl are liberated along with the dirt, rendering the disk, while possibly quite clean, not very good for music playback. Maybe there is some way to overcome the difficulties, but no one seems to have yet done so.

Hmm... I use this on an industrial basis with extremely sensitive components, and I can tell you that if vinyl is being liberated, then either a wholly inappropriate saponifier is being used, or the stuff was sitting in the grooves loose anyway, and the cleaner was dislodging it by cavitation - which is what it's supposed to do!

To a first approximation, the effect of a stylus tracking correctly is going to be of a very similar order to the force exterted upon the vinyl by the cavitation action. The difference is that cavitation will take place over the whole groove, and not just the sidewalls. I would expect the local instantaneous heating effect to be broadly similar as well, and vinyl can cope with this quite adequately.

Ultrasonic cleaning isn't an entirely straightforward process. The chances are that unless you understand the specific physics/chemistry of what you are cleaning, it won't work anywhere near as well as it should, and may well cause damage. And yes, a few of the more well-known saponifiers will react with vinyl...