> On Jan 5, 2017, at 8:55 AM, Pete Turnbull <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 05/01/2017 13:22, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>> > From: Klemens Krause
>>
>> > We clean our RK05 disks in a very robust way: with cheap burning spirit
>> > and paper towels. ... We rubbed away thick black traces from occasional
>> > head crashes and we never removed the oxide coating with this torture.
>
>> First, what is 'burning spirit'? (I assume this is a straight translation
>> into English of some German term, but not knowing German... :-) After poking
>> around with Google for a while (hampered no little by the fact that it's the
>> name of a band, and also a term in World of Warcraft :-), it seems like it
>> might be acetone?
>
> I'm sure it's not ! :-) He'll mean the sort of alcohol used in a spirit
> burner. The UK equivalent is "methylated spirit" - primarily ethanol but
> with a (un)healthy dose of methanol to make it unfit to drink (and hence
> exempt from excise duty) plus pyridine (and small amounts of other things) to
> give it an unpleasant taste and odour, and some methyl purple dye to make it
> obvious at a glance. Denatured alcohol, in other words. I don't think the
> German (EU) version has the dye although it does contain IPA and MEK. For
> cleaning, because of that dye, isopropyl alcohol (IPA, isopropanol) is often
> a better choice in the UK.
>
> In the US, "rubbing alcohol" is mostly denatured ethanol (though "isopropyl
> rubbing alcohol" is mostly IPA), but always contains other chemicals as well.
> Either should do for cleaning a disk.
I recognized "burning spirit" by its Dutch analog, and yes, it means denatured
ethanol.
I would suggest avoiding these blends of random chemicals made with no real
concern for purity. You need a liquid here that will evaporate cleanly,
leaving behind neither oily residue nor solids. I see no reason to believe
that denatured alcohol or rubbing alcohol are made to those standards.
paul
