Pooh Bear wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:

Isopropanol will damage natural rubber. It won't hurt urethane and it won't
hurt neoprene, so on most things i'll be fine but occasionally you'll find
something where it's not so good.

True, although I don't recall ever coming across natural rubber for pinch
rollers. Just possibly perhaps. Would Ampex 350/351s have used natural rubber ?
Maybe we used Freon to clean them ?

350s and original 440s also. But, the Sono-Mag aftermarket ones for the
440s were okay with isopropanol.

Probably any natural rubber rollers have been long replaced, I dunno.

As a kid I once tried cleaning the heads on an early Philips cassette machine.
Couldn't afford / didn't know of isopranol back then, so used meths, as I had on
my dear old Ferrorgraph with no probs.

Rec / rep head fell apart ! Made of some nasty plastic. It was knackered anyway
thankfully.

There was some discussion of plastic cassette deck heads and solvent problems
on the Ampex mailing list a few years ago, which came out of the discussion
of why Ampex recommended xylene as the standard head cleaning material.

(Xylene is really effective at removing deposits, even sticky shed stuff,
but it's a lot more hazardous for your body than freon, which is why it
got pretty much replaced with Freon TF).
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."