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Re: [ARSCLIST] polyethylene sleeves and record cleaning machine
Rolando Delgado Miranda
J' Biblioteca y Archivo "Odilio Urfé"
Museo Nacional de la Música
La Habana, Cuba
Clave - Revista Cubana de Música wrote:
> We know that two very useful tools to achieve a good state of conservation,
> besides the perfection of the environmental conditions, are the soft
> polyethylene sleeves like the Nagaoka and the Keith Monks and Loricraft
> record cleaning machine. Our questions are: who sell these products?,
> what price do they have? and if you know other variants with the same
> results.
At the risk of being crassly commercial, besides offering Audio-Restoration
services...
I AM the North American sole distributor of the Keith Monks "Archivist"
Record Cleaning Machines.
I sought the agency because of the quality of the machine itself, and I am
sold on the performance of the machine, as are many others... I use it daily
in my restoration suite.
Let me tell you a story...
A few years ago I was seeking a method of cleaning phonograph records
that was...
1. excellent at what it was designed to do
2. versatile and adaptable
3. safe for personnel and artifacts
4. efficient use of conservator's time
5. usable by relatively non-skilled, but trained personnel
6. easily maintained by those same personnel
7. cheap
all for applying to the task at hand, namely cleaning of a large collection
of a wide variety of phonograph records, ranging from all the shellac
compositions, to styrene, vinyl, lacquer and metal types.
In my opinion, Monks had cornered that market on 6 out of the 7 points...
it wasn't cheap!
Other lesser expensive devices were looked at, and they all had one or more
deficiencies including Loricraft, VPI and Nitty-Gritty (I still cringe at
a device designed to clean records containing the word "grit" in the name!)
I approached Keith Monks to make a special version of his standard record
cleaning machine that contained two separate chemistry systems (for minimal
possibility of applying damaging cleaning fluids to a valuable artifact) and
that would accommodate up to 16 inch discs. This was how the "Archivist"
machine came into existence. The first one went into my own restoration
suite, and the second went to Gilles St. Laurent at Canada's National
Library in Ottawa. Since then, three "Archivist's" have been shipped to
Library of Congress, and others to numerous individuals and institutions
with large phonograph record holdings.
The Keith Monks "Archivist" Record Cleaning Machine is the only dual
chemistry cleaning machine available, and it allows cleaning shellac
based and vinyl based discs using different solutions without flushing
and cleaning the machine when switching disc types. It is designed for
continuous duty and suits applications of larger mixed collections, and
overcomes most of the flaws in other manufacturer's units.
WARNING:
==========================================================
The Loricraft is a cheap knock-off of the Monks machine that is deficient
in a number of areas including:-
The vacuum pump is not the high grade continuous duty industrial pump that
Monks uses.
There is no motorized buffer thread payout that the Monks machine uses.
The Loricraft machine runs a small segment of buffer thread over the entire
surface of the record being cleaned, where the Monks machine continually
and automatically changes the thread to prevent build-up of dirt from the
cleaning process being transferred to and scratching the later grooves of
the same disc.
The waste bottle is hung off the side of the Loricraft rather than housed
internally as in the Monks machine.
There is no fluid dispensing system nor precision brush to do the cleaning
work as is supplied with the Monks machine.
The Monks "Archivist" machine IS designed to clean 16" transcriptions, AND
it has a dual chemistry system with separate fluid dispensing and brush
assemblies.
Yes, the Loricraft machine is much cheaper, but then, you usually get what
you pay for!
===================================================
A few notes about cleaning fluids:-
The original Monks Record Cleaning Machine was intended for hi-end LP record
applications and recommended using ethyl alcohol (the drinking kind!).
This may have worked well for vinyl LP records, but it should never be used
for any other record cleaning purpose.
As any conservator should know, this would be deadly for cleaning
shellac 78's, because alcohol dissolves shellac, thus destroying the
grooved surface you were trying to clean!
The Archivist machine was designed to allow ready access to two separate
chemistry systems for this reason. If you are not using alcohol as a
cleaning fluid, the second reservoir can be filled with distilled water and
used as a rinse where other specialized fluids are used.
A safe and virtually universally available cleaner is Kodak Photo Flo 200
diluted 1:200 with distilled water.
There are a variety of cleaning methods and fluids that can be used
with the Monks machine for specialized cleaning tasks.
A typical example is The Disc Doctor who makes a group of brushes and
chemistry for doing hand cleaning which is comparable to what the Monks
machine does, but it trades your elbow grease for the more time efficient
machine functionality of the Monks cleaner. Some Monks users have chosen
to use the Disc Doctor's chemistry for their cleaning fluid of choice.
I'll expand a little on the Disc Doctor's cleaning system.
The brushes he supplies are excellent and the specialized chemistry,
likewise, is properly designed and works superbly well.
It is, however, a manual system requiring a significant amount of labor per
disc cleaned. If you have a source of free "grunt labor" to apply to the
process, this is by far the cheapest way to get almost surgically clean
records. If the applied labor costs hard money, then you will recoup the
initial expense rapidly with the Monks machine as well as speeding up the
through-put substantially.
Where the record collection is a large one (a lot more than a few hundreds),
this labor requirement may preclude using a manual system. The Disc Doctor's
chemistry can certainly be very effectively used with the Keith Monks Cleaning
Machine... in fact, I recommend it, and have recommended it for some
time, along with a few other things which I have used very successfully as
accessory items to the Monks machine. The Monks "Archivist" machine is the
first dual-chemistry machine for the purpose, and is ideally suited to this
process.
Specifically, I believe that one very significant advantage of the Monks
machine is the minimizing of the "wet" cycle of the cleaning process, and this
should be clearly obvious to anyone involved with archival storage and
restoration of phonograph records.
You will probably never find a cleaning machine/system that will fulfill
all 7 attributes that I listed above, however, excepting for price, the
Keith Monks machine comes closest.
Full details and pictures of the Monks "Archivist" machine are here:
http://www.audio-restoration.com/monks5.php
List of links to other sources, including the Disc Doctor are here:-
http://www.audio-restoration.com/links.php
NOTE:
I wrote the manual for the Keith Monks "Archivist" machine and it has a
variety of suggestions about cleaning and solutions. If you want a .pdf
file of this manual, write me off-list and I'll be glad to send it to you
as an email attachment.
The Keith Monks RCM was shown and demonstrated at the ARSC/SAM conference in
Cleveland March 10th through 14th. If you were there, most of the above
information is no longer new to you!
... Graham Newton
(North American distributor for the Keith Monks "Archivist"
Record Cleaning Machine)
--
Audio Restoration by Graham Newton, http://www.audio-restoration.com
World class professional services applied to tape or phonograph records for
consumers and re-releases, featuring CEDAR's new CAMBRIDGE processes.