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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. Hi, I'm Kurt at KGB Studios, Seattle
and today we've got a little show and tell to show you. These are the tools of the trade
that we're going to be using in these next few sections here. The first one that we're
going to be doing is going to be using this chemical here. Like I said there's a lot of
debate about Isopropyl alcohol or Ethynol or different types of cleaning agents that
were used. I've chosen kind of a combination of an Ethyl/Isopropyl alcohol for head cleaning.
It seems not to leave any residue and it evaporates very quickly. This section here is called
head lubricant and it's a silicon based, again doesn't leave any residue. And this of course
is our trusty rusty de-magnetizer. It doesn't look like some sort of weird tool or anything.
It's actually a de-magnetizer for tape heads. So with that, we're going to proceed with
this section on how to do these as we go through with how to restore a 4-track reel-to-reel
recorder. O.K. as we were saying, in this section what we are going to do is, we're
going to be removing this piece here, the head part. So, that we can investigate what's
underneath because we're going to be doing the cleaning and the de-magnetization of it.
So, this is the head and as you see, there are stop marks so that I know exactly where
the threads were stopped on the screws, first of all. But this is the head assembly right
here. This is the capstan motor and this is the pressure roller. Then these are guides
for the tape to go through. We'll get a little bit different view here in a second, but this
is an important piece here that we'll be talking about later but for this section here we're
going to be talking about cleaning and de-magnetizing this section of the head assembly. O.K. now
we have the heads as we're scouring across here. You can see some really interesting
effects. This head here is one of the erase heads. Followed by another one of the erase
heads. This is the playback/record head depending upon your switch on the synchronizer and this
is also another playback and record head here.