Thompson Freeman wrote:
On 08/10/2008 02:44:05 AM, Tim wrote:
On Sat, 2008-08-09 at 21:20 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
*Denatured* alcohol!
Yes. For those unfamiliar with the term, the usual cleaning alcohols
that you can buy are deliberately *poisoned* to stop people drinking
them (go figure!). I had to convince the local pharmacist to give me
some untainted alcohol at one stage. Later on, I had an even hard
time
convincing customs and excise to let me buy pure alcohol. They only
relented after telling them about how poisonous and dangerous the
alternatives were.
That tainting is bad news for cleaning video and audio heads. They
can
be used, if you're desperate, and you wipe things clean and dry,
instead
of just letting them evaporate. They contain a variety of things
that
you don't want left behind on the heads, and that's very easy to do.
You're much better off finding something more appropriate.
Be especially careful cleaning anything plastic or rubber, solvents
can
destroy them. Remember that on the audio heads, at least, the head
block unit might have the magnetic part of the head embedded in a
plastic material.
Do NOT use turps.
<<snip>>
I'm having a devil of a time following this thread with respect to the
solvent. Not that I'm about to clean any betamax heads, or any magnetic
tape heads soon, but with a background in chemistry...
Apparently, we also have some challenges with having different
countries represented here, which also changes the underlying terms
some. Note that I quickly checked the Wikipedia for reorientation.
Denatured alcohol is ethanol (the drinking type of alcohol) which is
mixed with something to make it unpalatable to poisonous to drink. If
memory serves, there are something like 200 additives approved for this
purpose, ranging from methanol (wood alcohol) through aviation gas to
some dyes.
Rubbing alcohol was originally something like 70% (vol) ethanol plus or
minus a good bit. In commerce, however, you are just as likely to find
isopropyl alcohol as ethanol sold as rubbing alcohol. Since isopropyl
is toxic, it is more likely to be a fairly simple solution of isopropyl
alcohol and water. Here in the States, you can find the isopropyl
rubbing alcohol at 90%, sold as an antiseptic. The bottle label I have
indicates, but does not explicitely state, that the product contains
only the alcohol and water. I don't know conditions
elsewhere.
As solvents, it is my impression that isopropyl alcohol and ethanol are
very similar. As such, I'm curious if the video engineers have tried
it.
In the heyday of tape, the liquid sold as tape head and guide cleaner
was normally high purity isopropanol. I don't know if this is a better
or worse cleaner than any other form of alcohol, but it was the standard
material for many years. Some other cleaners can attack certain
plastics, but isopropanol is pretty innocuous. Its rare to find any
material it will damage. It was also used as a stylus cleaner for LP
record players, and various other media cleaning jobs.
Regards,
Steve
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