[Coco] Cleaning Coco disks

gene heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Fri Jan 20 20:12:26 EST 2012


On Friday, January 20, 2012 08:01:18 PM Steven Hirsch did opine:

> On Fri, 20 Jan 2012, Bill Pierce wrote:
> > What is best liquid to clean an actual disk after it's been removed
> > from it's sleeve? I have a ton of old Coco disks that are filthy
> > (basically found in trash) and need cleaning before inserting them
> > into a drive. I've know how to get the disk from the sleeve and make
> > a temporary sleeve. These disks will be read from once to be copied
> > and heads cleaned between disks.
> 
> I would just use a mild, non-detergent liquid soap and warm water.  Use
> only your fingers to scrub so nothing gets scratched.

A small piece of 'microfiber' toweling would work even better as it will 
allow the abrasives to embed in the fibers where a few strokes to help 
dissolve the contaminants will not cause harm.  Ones fingers can be 
surprisingly abrasive.

Then rinse well to remove the soap film, with a final rinse in distilled 
water.  Let dry _well_ in a < 40% humidity environment as damp magnetic 
coatings are VERY abrasive.  The least abrasive is cold, below 50F, and low 
humidity as in less than 50%.  I have seen some curves that show feeding 
videotape through a vcr at 80F and 80% RH causes 20x the wear that cold dry 
tape causes.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene>
<elmo> unclean: err, the admin team do not control the archive, that's the
       ftp cabal
<elmo> get your cabals right, damn it :-P



More information about the Coco mailing list