A Do-It-Yourself Record Cleaning Machine

1) A Record Cleaning Machine (RCM) for vacuum cleaning of records is a must for clean, click and pop free records, especially when buying used records. It requires a vacuum device of some sort, as well as a fixture for holding and spinning the records being cleaned. In keeping with the cheap trend of all of my Lenco projects, I decided to try to build one using stuff that I had lying around. I was given an old belt driven semi-automatic turntable, with a Sears nameplate, but built by Chuo-Denki using the same design used for the Fisher turntables in the 1980’s. It was just full of Rube Goldberg gears and levers to do the automatic arm lift and arm returns, and I just tore it down to nothing more than a bare spindle, and then added in a powerful motor that was stripped from an old wide carriage dot matrix printer, as shown on the picture below.

2) I added some Padauk wood switch plates and wired the motor so that I had high and low range speeds, and forward and reverse direction for record rotation. A separate switch was run to the vacuum so that cleaning could be done using the carbon fibre brushes and cleaning fluid, as well as having the fluid vacuumed from the surface. The power supply as a multi-voltage wall wart, that was originally used by a commercial 1200 baud modem used by a time sharing service. The vacuum cleaner I used was a very cheap rebuilt Cambell-Hausfield car vacuum/compressor (sold for 12-20$ Cd), modified to have a water separation chamber (an old nut jar), as shown below

3) The most expensive part of the project was building a suitably powerful drive for the turntable, and here I used a precision pilot bearing ($26) and an epoxied O-ring to build an idler drive for the turntable. This worked out very well and provides a non-stalling platter for the RCM which withstands the drag of scrubbing the record surface and running the vacuum over the surface to remove the cleaning fluid and the rinse water. The idler drive looks simple, but actually took a fair bit of engineering and tweaking to get it right.

4) The whole assembly was mounted in a Birch plywood box, with handles, so that the turntable just sits in the opening at the top, and can be tilted up to allow access to the vacuum inside for cleaning out the fluid reservoir. In all, it actually ended up being very presentable. The business end of the vacuum was made from a length of ½ inch ID PVC tubing, with velvet pile fabric glued to the surface, with a wood plug at the far end, attached to clear vinyl tubing ½ inch OD and 3/8 inch ID which connects to the vacuum.

5) The RCM has been in constant use and many of my old records, and those I have bought, have been brought back to pristine condition. The quiet background on the records just makes the whole vinyl playback process so much better. I have auditioned my old Lenco for several of my friends, and they are just blown away by how quiet the backgrounds are on the cleaned records. The whole system is just amazing. I would never have believed that LP records could sound so good.