How to Clean Your Vinyl Records with Wood Glue

Dur­ing the gold­en age of vinyl, Ron­co sold vac­u­ums to keep your records clean. But there was always a cheap­er DIY hack — a hack demon­strat­ed in a video cre­at­ed by a Youtu­ber who sim­ply goes by “ghettofunk13.” Just pour some wood glue on your record, spread it around care­ful­ly as the turntable spins (don’t get it on the cen­ter label), and you can appar­ent­ly get rid of those snaps, crack­les, and pops. The video is pret­ty straight­for­ward. But it’s worth not­ing the adden­dum “ghettofunk13” lat­er added in text: “You can use con­sid­er­ably less glue and still get the same effect — it cuts the dry time way down. Just be sure that you get the whole record cov­ered!”

Over on Metafil­ter, one com­menter took “ghettofunk13” to task, say­ing “The bass is mud­dy and there’s no clar­i­ty and sparkle at the high end.… He should have used de-ion­ized wood glue from a poly­car­bon­ate (NOT polypropy­lene) bot­tle, and spread it in the direc­tion of rota­tion with a hand-pol­ished cedar shake. Ama­teur.” Just some­thing to con­sid­er if you plan to do some DIY record clean­ing this week­end. You can get a few more details on the process here. Try at your own risk.

FYI, over at Kottke.org, you can see an excel­lent micro­scop­ic pho­to of vinyl record grooves. Jason writes, “When you look real­ly close­ly at record grooves, like at 1000x mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, you can see the wave­forms of the music itself. Sooo cool.”

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

World Records: New Pho­to Exhib­it Pays Trib­ute to the Era of Vinyl Records & Turnta­bles