OT: Cleaning video head on my Betamax VCR

[Tim]

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.

> 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.  ;-)

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

> 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.

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.

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.

-- 
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2.6.25.11-97.fc9.i686

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