If you don’t own any records, please pass this along to someone you know who does.

Because this method of cleaning your vinyl is miraculous! I wish you could see how excited Andrew gets when he cleans a record with this method ….

I’m fairly certain we found this method on Lifehacker.com : In short wood glue and the material LP albums are so chemically similar that the wood glue can’t bind to the record. It can however bind to everything else on the record which includes oil, dust, dirt, fungus, the crayon your nephew rubbed on it, and so on. You’re essentially giving your record a spa wax and ripping all the impurities off of it with the glue.

Andrew is a HUGE record collector.

The thing about records : If you just put it out there that you like vinyl, people WANT to give you boxes and boxes of it. You would be amazed how many boxes of old records Andrew has been gifted. All free. And there are always some real treasures.

On the flip side, they are usually really dirty and sometimes scratched. And Andrew has to go through the effort of digging through them and getting rid of the ones he doesn’t want.

But he loves it ….

Phone calls from some of my parents’ friends whose parents just died, or his uncle who is moving, and on and on ….

But, of course, the records all look like this

BEFORE:

(don’t forget to do a ‘before’ listen to the record so you can compare the sound quality)

All you need to clean your records is:

• a record player
• wood glue
• a card or piece of cardstock

Place your selected record on the player and turn it on (without using the needle)

Having the record spinning helps spread the glue more efficiently.

Slowly line the record with the wood glue (starting from the inside out seems to work the best)

NEXT:

Use your card or cardstock to spread the glue.

The record player should still be spinning the record.

You can just use the wide surface of the card to help and guide the wood glue to spread out to cover the surface of the record completely.

NEXT:

Turn off the record player (you don’t want it spinning after the glue is spread).

Allow the wood glue to dry. Depending on the size of the record and the thickness of the glue, you need to allow between 8-12 hours to dry.

NEXT:

Carefully (so so so carefully) peel off the dried glue.

NOTE:

If you are very careful (and lucky) you can sometimes pull off the entire layer of glue in one piece.

And then you can ACTUALLY PLAY it like a record. The sound is very faint and the music plays backwards but you CAN do it.

AFTER:

(isn’t it pretty?)

NOTE: Make sure to try this with a Goodwill record first, and not a valuable record, so you can practice the method.

Have fun!!