ultrasonic cleaning for disk heads

[Fritz Mueller]

I watched with great interest one of curiousmarc’s recent Alto videos, wherein they clean a Diablo drive head ultrasonically.  I’ve been struggling a bit with my restored RK05 drives to completely clean the heads after minor head crashes.  Not being able to get them really sparkling clean makes me always worried about running the drives for more than a few minutes at a time, and a little nervous every time I spin them up…. Scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing with IPA and kimwipes just doesn’t seem to get all the crud off.

I do have an alignment pack that I could use to re-align the heads after removing them for a proper cleaning this way.  Decent ultrasonic cleaners aren’t terribly expensive and might be nice to have around the shop anyway (I could also do all my eyeglasses :-)

In the video, the heads are submerged in IPA in a glass cylinder, which is then placed in the ultrasonic bath.

Has anybody on the list here done this and have tips/advice beyond what can be seen in the video?  It looked very effective!  I’m also having a little trouble sourcing the squat form glass graduated cylinder online.

	cheers,
	   —FritzM.