Vacuuming after ultrasonic vinyl cleaning

I rinse with a repurposed idler drive turntable with a ribbed rubber mat that makes minimal contact with the vinyl.  I then vac with a KAB.  Nothing but the felt lips touch the record surface.  I could not imagine not rinsing with ultrapure water and vacing after ultrasonic cleaning.  The US cleaning fluid has all kinds of dirt and impurities in it that will be left on the record surface without a proper rinse and vac.

Greetings,

 I don’t have a static problem where I live. For most albums I use a US cleaner and let the machine fan dry it. If there is any static buildup I’ll DeStat the album and/or touch album to my grounding post.

For my special albums I’ll do the same as dogbeery is doing, using my VPI 16 to do a final rinse.

ClearAudio make a cleaner that does both, vacuums and US’s it at the same time. Nice unit. It’s kinda expensive.

Joe Nies

You all should give the old fashioned way a try!

@jim94025: I too prefer to vacuum off the water on ultrasonically-cleaner LP’s, and like you own a VPI. What I did was look on the big website for cork and rubber coasters (that are placed under drinking glasses), about the same size as the 4" center label on LP’s. My idea was to place a coaster on the VPI’s platter, to hold the wet LP off the dry cork platter mat whilst drying the topside, then flip the LP over and do the other side.

There were a bunch available, and I chose an 8-pk. of coasters made by a company named Wow Ding. The product listing described it as felt, but it’s more of a soft spongy foam, each coaster being 4-3/8" in diameter and 1/8" thick. You of course must create a hole in the center of the coaster to enable you to slide the coaster onto the platter’s threaded spindle, but that’s easily accomplished with an X-Acto knife. You can stack as many coaster as you need to raise the LP off the platter as much as you want.

I just looked up my order, and that coaster is no longer available. No matter, there are many others to choose from.

For those who don’t yet have a vacuum machine, and are planning on going ultrasonic, another route to take is to buy a vacuum machine that has a small LP platter, rather than a 12" one. The two models offered by Pro-Ject look real good.

I use a thin plastic slip mat sheet for the first side vac, then remove when flipping the album. It came as a protective sheet with a Herbies slip mat. Works great