When to Clean Heads of Reel-to-Reel Tape 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. You can tell real quickly when one of these heads, one of these two heads is distorted or dirty because the actual sound of the recording comes out really fuzzy or distorted. And that's usually an indicator on the reel-to-reel that your heads are dirty. So, you definitely want to go through and clean these before every major recording. That should do it on the head cleaning as you can see. The general rules again is to clean the whole tape path, the tape guides and use and upward down motion or a side to side motion. All right. Great. All right, so now we're going to be cleaning this pressure roller here and the capstan, which is where this Q-tip is sitting right here. Plus the remainder sections for the tape guides, which are contained over on this side, the right side of the tape machine. So, let?s do that now. Generally what I do is I just rub, again, after I've got a nice fresh supply on the Q-tip. I just rub it down as it goes around relatively quickly and you can generally do a great job of cleaning off the capstan. Again, pretty nominal and you can see very clearly that there is some residual that has just ingrained itself into the capstan. How do you get that off? Well, one of the best ways you can do that is with an eraser. Some use and eraser and then they go back and they re-clean it. I generally don't do that because it's basically just rubber from this pressure roller right here. Same thing on this, tape guides again. I go through and I just clean those with the Q-tip. I make sure that there's no dust. If there is a little bit of dust what you could do is take a little spray container and actually spray off that piece. Anyway, that takes care of the cleaning of the whole head assembly and the tape path. Let me show you now, just briefly, what I used to clean, the pressure roller right here because it's rubber. Now, a lot of the alcohols; Isopropyl, Ethyl alcohol. That will actually harden this rubber and I don't like it to harden so I tend to use what I call simply; water. We'll use that and I'll show you how to do that next."