Record restoration

Many vinyl records have had a hard time in the three decades since they became unfashionable and technically substitutable.

They’ve been hoarded, abandoned, dumped, stored, neglected, and abused.

Stacked, dusty, dampened, scratched, bent, finger-marked, and worse.

The sight and smell of a stash of boxes of records can bring forth both excitement of anticipation, and dread at the prospect of damage.

I’ve been lucky many times in my 50-year record accumulation to find some gems, and I’ve (intentionally) lost count of the times when some great records were unsalvageable.

So it’s surprising that today I saw a notice for a seminar at an audio show about record restoration, and I realised that whilst I’ve pretty much always been a diligent record cleaner, I’ve not really given a lot of thought to the restoration of records. Putting aside the focus of the seminar on the promotion of a proprietary – and predictably very expensive – product, I decided to do some reconnaissance on library archiving recommendations and DIY advice about record renovation.

Here’s an extreme treatment for ruined records …..

https://www.instructables.com/Bring-Ruined-Records-Back-to-Life/