Cleaning RK05 packs (Was: LGP-30 Memory Drum Update)

[Pete Turnbull]

On 05/01/2017 13:22, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: Klemens Krause
>
>     > We clean our RK05 disks in a very robust way: with cheap burning spirit
>     > and paper towels. ... We rubbed away thick black traces from occasional
>     > head crashes and we never removed the oxide coating with this torture.

> First, what is 'burning spirit'? (I assume this is a straight translation
> into English of some German term, but not knowing German... :-) After poking
> around with Google for a while (hampered no little by the fact that it's the
> name of a band, and also a term in World of Warcraft :-), it seems like it
> might be acetone?

I'm sure it's not ! :-)  He'll mean the sort of alcohol used in a spirit 
burner.  The UK equivalent is "methylated spirit" - primarily ethanol 
but with a (un)healthy dose of methanol to make it unfit to drink (and 
hence exempt from excise duty) plus pyridine (and small amounts of other 
things) to give it an unpleasant taste and odour, and some methyl purple 
dye to make it obvious at a glance.  Denatured alcohol, in other words. 
I don't think the German (EU) version has the dye although it does 
contain IPA and MEK.  For cleaning, because of that dye, isopropyl 
alcohol (IPA, isopropanol) is often a better choice in the UK.

In the US, "rubbing alcohol" is mostly denatured ethanol (though 
"isopropyl rubbing alcohol" is mostly IPA), but always contains other 
chemicals as well.  Either should do for cleaning a disk.

-- 
Pete
Pete Turnbull