Cleaning Heads of 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. And continuing on, this is actually a path on the left hand side. Followed by that, right in the middle of the screen and then it goes across. I'm just panning straight across the path as it goes up into the take-up reel. So that's the tape path. Now we're going to go back and show you how to clean these two heads in the next section. O.K. These are the Q-tips that we will use for cleaning the heads. So we'll grab those right now as we go through and we show you how to clean a 4-track reel-to-reel head. This fluid, this special type of head fluid that we'll use and of course our trusty Q-tips. That's what we're going to use right now as we clean this. O.K., so, remember the one that's in the center of your screen will be the one. So we'll dab that into the cleaner, the head cleaner at this point. Swab it down just a little bit and then we're going to swipe it across the head. There are some good rules to follow in terms of cleaning the head because you're going to need to practice good motion going across the face of the head face. As you see me doing right here. I like to go up and down and then I'll go across the face of the heads as well. The reason you do that with a cotton swab, is you will use good cleaning technique and you're going to actually see, as you can see here. You'll see the little bit of an oxide that's accumulating on the cotton there. Now you don't want to use a lot of pressure. You just want to use a good series of strokes and of course eyeball it really well to clean it up and we'll do that. O.K. now this is also a playback/record head and I tend to clean it both ways here on this one. You can see that there's a little bit of a sheath covering of it. So you definitely want to go up and down on that to clean that, as well as the pressure rollers, which is what I'm cleaning right now. And I go up and down on that one. Once you're satisfied with the cleaning process. That's the process to which you actually clean the heads. And that one is the record head and you can see here very clearly that we have some residual from the head. I also clean these little sections here for the guides. Make sure they are free from oxide as well. Believe it or not, you can actually tell quite readily when this head or the other tape record head is distorted.

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