How to Clean Your Vinyl Records with Wood Glue

Dur­ing the gold­en age of vinyl, Ron­co sold vac­u­ums to keep your records clean. But there was always a cheap­er DIY hack — a hack demon­strat­ed in a video cre­at­ed by a Youtu­ber who sim­ply goes by “ghettofunk13.” Just pour some wood glue on your record, spread it around care­ful­ly as the turntable spins (don’t get it on the cen­ter label), and you can appar­ent­ly get rid of those snaps, crack­les, and pops. The video is pret­ty straight­for­ward. But it’s worth not­ing the adden­dum “ghettofunk13” lat­er added in text: “You can use con­sid­er­ably less glue and still get the same effect — it cuts the dry time way down. Just be sure that you get the whole record cov­ered!”

Over on Metafil­ter, one com­menter took â€śghettofunk13” to task, say­ing “The bass is mud­dy and there’s no clar­i­ty and sparkle at the high end.… He should have used de-ion­ized wood glue from a poly­car­bon­ate (NOT polypropy­lene) bot­tle, and spread it in the direc­tion of rota­tion with a hand-pol­ished cedar shake. Ama­teur.” Just some­thing to con­sid­er if you plan to do some DIY record clean­ing this week­end. You can get a few more details on the process here. Try at your own risk.

FYI, over at Kottke.org, you can see an excel­lent micro­scop­ic pho­to of vinyl record grooves. Jason writes, “When you look real­ly close­ly at record grooves, like at 1000x mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, you can see the wave­forms of the music itself. Sooo cool.”

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

World Records: New Pho­to Exhib­it Pays Trib­ute to the Era of Vinyl Records & Turnta­bles


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Comments (5)
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  • GeneMachine says:

    The “tak­ing to task” is actu­al­ly a jokey ref­er­ence to hi-fi obses­sives who talk about the ben­e­fits of gold cables, etc…

  • seaweb says:

    Maybe. But 18 hours-ish a side? I did the math. At that rate, I’m look­ing at 1.44 mil­lion hours just to do my LPs (that’s 60,000 days, if I do them one right after anoth­er, or 16+ years).

  • as;dlfkj says:

    Though I kin­da won­der what’s wrong with some iso­propyl and a record brush? Might be a bit more envi­ron­men­tal­ly nice, as point­ed out by some­body above.

  • Mike C says:

    What hap­pens at 3.04 of the video? It’s like the image is peeled off for some rea­son. Is it the same rec­cord before and after that moment?

  • Al says:

    Would­n’t rec­om­mend this at all. Been read­ing about the work of this guy who is both a vinyl buff and a chemist so he knows how to get dirt off vinyl in the best pos­si­ble way…

    http://www.tnt-audio.com/accessories/discdoctor_e.html

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