Tools for Cleaning Reel-to-Reel Recorder

Video Transcript

For Expert Village, I'm Kurt, chief engineer at KGB Studios. We're continuing our series on how to restore a 4-track reel-to-reel tape machine. Hi, I'm Kurt at KGB Studios, Seattle and today we've got a little show and tell to show you. These are the tools of the trade that we're going to be using in these next few sections here. The first one that we're going to be doing is going to be using this chemical here. Like I said there's a lot of debate about Isopropyl alcohol or Ethynol or different types of cleaning agents that were used. I've chosen kind of a combination of an Ethyl/Isopropyl alcohol for head cleaning. It seems not to leave any residue and it evaporates very quickly. This section here is called head lubricant and it's a silicon based, again doesn't leave any residue. And this of course is our trusty rusty de-magnetizer. It doesn't look like some sort of weird tool or anything. It's actually a de-magnetizer for tape heads. So with that, we're going to proceed with this section on how to do these as we go through with how to restore a 4-track reel-to-reel recorder. O.K. as we were saying, in this section what we are going to do is, we're going to be removing this piece here, the head part. So, that we can investigate what's underneath because we're going to be doing the cleaning and the de-magnetization of it. So, this is the head and as you see, there are stop marks so that I know exactly where the threads were stopped on the screws, first of all. But this is the head assembly right here. This is the capstan motor and this is the pressure roller. Then these are guides for the tape to go through. We'll get a little bit different view here in a second, but this is an important piece here that we'll be talking about later but for this section here we're going to be talking about cleaning and de-magnetizing this section of the head assembly. O.K. now we have the heads as we're scouring across here. You can see some really interesting effects. This head here is one of the erase heads. Followed by another one of the erase heads. This is the playback/record head depending upon your switch on the synchronizer and this is also another playback and record head here.

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