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In Reply to: RE: My DIY approach to ultrasonic record cleaning posted by Rushton on October 21, 2016 at 11:58:48
I have been using Triton X-114, Propanol-1, Labtone, and steam distilled water with my old Nitty Gritty 3.0. I once tried Quaternary salts and distilled water by itself many years ago, but that didn't work. The quaternary salt solutions I used were in the picture below. The SD43 is readily available for me at our large electronics store in town, but I am sure the Radio Shack brand is long gone. All of Radio Shack stores locally are gone anyway.
I have used my Taiwanese ultrasonic machine (picture below) with the cleaning solution mentioned above, but my machine is far from convenient. It does only one record at a time, and it must be manually turned. I have to pump out the water with a hand pump after 9 records, and I pass that water through a coffee filter and into a gallon jug for storage. I also give the ultrasonic cleaned record a rinse with a solution of steam distilled water and 5% alcohol. I found that straight distilled water would not spread out adequately over the record surface without the alcohol.
I have a friend that just purchased the same tank and record turning apparatus as yours, so I will talk to him about the cleaning solutions that you are using. I believe that he is only using distilled water at this time, as he doesn't have a vacuum cleaning machine.
It is interesting that Photo Flo 200 is a nonionic surfactant just like Tergitol and Triton X100. Tergitol, like Photo Flo, also contains a couple other glycol compounds. In the early 60s record cleaning expert Cecil Watts used a photographic wetting solution(probably Photo Flo) for cleaning records.
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Please send me an email where you purchase the Taiwan made sonic cleaner. It's perfect for a design I have in mind THX
VINYLY CRAZED
Thank you, alaskahiatt. I appreciate you sharing the process you've used for quite a while. Good stuff. It's interesting the Photo-Flo has always been such a mainstay of diy formulas over the years and is now being more and more warned away. The chemist posting in Audio Kharma thread I referenced in my essay had this to say about Photo Flo:"Photoflo is a mixture of mainly Propylene glycol and a smaller amount of octylphenoxy polyethoxyethyl alcohol. Guess what the latter essentially is? Triton! The former is not really necessary (it's what keeps things moist, making films look and rinse spot free)..." [ Link ]
and
"Photoflo is not recommended because it is mostly propylene glycol (up to 30%, while the surfactant alcohol is merely 5%) which is a coating agent and may remain on your album even after the water washes (i say MAY because nobody seems to have done the study on vinyl records, but it is well-documented as coating on films)." [ Link ]
The glycol is the reason many formulas are dropping it these days. Why use something that is basically Triton when you can get pure Triton much less expensively and not have the glycol to deal with.
Edits: 10/21/16
purchase it easily at a Kodak or a Photo store. Pure chemical grade products in the last century were hard to locate before the internet, and, I believe, in some cases only available to institutions. I was able 15 or 20 years ago to find a chemical supply company on the internet in order to purchase my bottle of Triton X-114. I only learned of Triton X-114 by reading Laura dearborn's book "Good Sound."
I now have a warning for Triton X solutions that arose two days ago. When I went to my hifi accessory shelf to locate something, I discovered that the Triton X-114 bottle had been leaking from some hole in the soft plastic bottle used by the chemical supplier. At first I thought it was one of the turntable oils stored on the shelf, but the fluid washed off in water and produced suds. I then noticed the bottle of Triton X-114 was only half full. As you know, only a little of the Triton X products are used in cleaning solutions. There was no way that the 250ml bottle should have been only half full. So, I have transferred all of the remaining Triton solution to a glass jar and hope I don't have to handle all that clean up again. It was very hard to remove the Triton solution from all the other items that were sitting on the shelf. All the paper goods including small boxes were thrown away. I hope my septic system will be okay.
Since nothing on my accessory shelf was sharp, I am guessing that the nonionic surfactant in Triton X-114 finally ate a hole in the soft plastic bottle after all these years. I will continue to use Triton compounds for cleaning, but I will make sure that they are stored in glass jars from now on.
My bottle of Triton is only a couple years old, but who knows how long it sat in someone's stock before I bought it. Think I'll get a glass bottle for it just to be safe. It sits in on the top shelf of a closet, and the mess that would result from a leak would be pretty ugly.
Yikes! Thanks for sharing this. I'd not heard a similar story of the plastic container failing over time. You say the container is a soft plastic. Do you know whether it is HDPE or something else?
Laura Dearborn was always an amazing independent thinker and explorer in audio. Here's just another example.
Tomorrow, I will put lots of water in the bottle and confirm where the leak occurred.
Thanks, that's a relief. All of my Tergitol came in high density (HDPE) bottles, recycle code 2. I'm hoping that's a bit more durable.
two vertical cracks that were not next to any seam. The once flexible plastic seemed to have become very brittle. I am not certain whether that was the problem of aged plastic or the effect of the triton surfactant on the plastic. I any case, I am using a glass bottle now and will be in the future.
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