OT: Cleaning video head on my Betamax VCR

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 10 August 2008, Tim wrote:
>Tim:
>>> I don't think I'd be keen on using paint thinner, though.
>
>Gene Heskett:
>> It works fine Tim, and at circa $8 a quart, or $17 a gallon at your
>> local ACE Hdwe, is a heck of a lot cheaper than paying $5 at the shack
>> for a 2 oz bottle that probably has some methyl chloride or MEK in it
>> too, neither of which is good for humans or required to do the job.
>
>You must clean a lot of heads to need it in those amounts!  ;-)  I got
>several years worth out of a 1 litre bottle of ethanol.  And crudely
>converting volume and monetary units, I think the price's fairly
>similar.

Chuckle,  its so universal I bought a 6 gallon case of it, to be used to 
refill the quart cans when they ran low.  It gets used for everything, 
although when time to clean off a PCB I've just repaired, I rather prefer 
acetone, it a better solvent for some of the resins in solder.

>> FWIW, the painting business also requires quite pure, contaminate free
>> solvents, purer then the stuff you buy by the 55 gallon drum to mix
>> with nitromethane for your 1/4 mile monster.
>
>I'm going to presume that refers to a car.  ;-)

Dragsters, where the mileage translates to approximately 10 gallons per 
mile. :)  Been there, done some of that too.

>> The ACE Hdwe version comes in a handy container that can be carried to
>> the job.
>
>I'm not sure what the abbreviation stands for,

Hdwe is a common english abbreviation for Hardware.

>but I've always hated 
>child-proof lids.  Some of them can be right bastards to get off.

Yup, I'm not convinced that plastic slip cover is worth the hassle.  Better 
described as a PITA.

>> Its also far less damaging over the long term to the pinch rollers
>> than Freon TF ever was
>
>I would have thought thinner to be even worse.  Though there's a
>collection of different things sold as "paint thinner," I guess you'd
>have to be sure to pick one of the more suitable ones.  Turps is one of
>them, and that'd be deadly to the rubber.  I've seen the mess that made
>to the outside of a machine when someone wiped the front panel with
>turps.

Around me, that would be a capital offense. :)

>I guess I've been lucky that I've never really had to cope with grotty
>pinch rollers, much.  Only the audio cassette decks and one of the
>half-inch reel-to-reels seemed to collect muck on them.

Yup, audio cassette tape is loaded with lubricants.  Not good for pinch 
rollers at all.
>
>We had a bit of fun tripping down memory lane resurrecting a VTR to play
>back something from 1974 just a few weeks back.  That's a year before we
>officially had colour TV in Australia, though I can see that some of the
>recordings did have colour sub-carrier present.  Somewhere I've got
>another half-inch open-reel tape with "Apollo mission" written on the
>box.  It's old enough that it might be a live off-air recording, rather
>than some documentary after the fact.  But it's a different format, so
>I'll have to do some scrounging for another machine.

The Apollo tape sounds interesting!  1974 would probably have been a 3/4" sony 
u-matic.  Quite common in the day, but that was early in that era too.  No 
idea what the 1/2" format would have been, there were several false starts 
before u-matic took over the field for 20 years in the smaller markets.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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