Home brew cleaning solution

Do a search in Vinyl Asylum under "cleaning fluid DIY" and you will find many different recipes. One of the more common is:

"Here's Harry Weisfeld's recipe (the VPI president, who seems to prefer it over the VPI fluid they sell!). Put 16 oz. of isopropl alcohol in a gallon bottle, fill the bottle with distilled water, add approx. 8 drops of Dawn dishwashing liquid as a surfactant, and use it happily. I do, works great."

The recipe that I have used to clean 8,000 LPs is 40% isopropyl alcohol, 60% distilled water, with a few drops of Kodak Fotoflow as a surface tension reducer and a couple of drops of pure ammonia window cleaner.

These DIY solutions will do fine for getting the record clean enough to hear if it is a 'keeper' or not. If it is a keeper, then you can always go back and use one of the proprietary fluids to get the last little bit of grundge out of the grooves. If it is not a keeper, why spend the money?

Kodak does not recommend Photo-Flo's use on vinyl. This is a true statement. However, it is based on legal liability and not chemistry. If you call Kodak you will find out that they will say "not recommended for ......." on anything unless they have specifically tested it. Kodak has never tested Photo-flo on vinyl. Thus, it is not recommended. This does not mean that Photo-flo is harmful in any way to vinyl.

Photo-flo is a heavy alcohol. Alcohols do not damage vinyl in normal record cleaning usage. In order for ethanol (a much more reactive alcohol than Photo-flo) to damage vinyl it needs to be 90-100% pure, in contact for over 20 minutes, at a temperature exceeding 130 degrees fahrenheit. Isopropyl is even less reactive than ethanol and Photo-flo significantly less than isopropyl.