[Robert Grant]

A little less than two years ago, I installed a few VCRs on my sets, of various ages (one is actually a Beta), went to clean them with video head cleaning cassettes, only to find that all of them had empty fluid bottles!

At that time, I was able to buy a new cleaner cassette from a big box store (the cassette is VHS, but the fluid is also used in a Beta cassette. I made sure to close the cap on the bottle of fluid as tightly as I could every time I used it.

Fast forward to today, I went to to a head cleaning in a recently acquired VCR (playback is fine, but new recordings look fine only in scanning mode. In normal playback, the picture is vertically displaced and there is no sound).

To my shock, the vial of cleaning fluid is already completely empty! I just can't understand how it can all disappear (like, whatever happened to the theory of conservation of matter?). Is the plastic vial deliberately porous, so that customers have to frequently buy more product? (a vile vial?)

So it occurs to me that I (we - VCR users) will need a substitute for head cleaning fluids. I found an MSDS for one brand of head cleaner from Britain, that gave the ingredients as pentane and Penta-2-ol. The latter is another name for isopropyl alcohol (which is what all video head cleaners smell like), but Pentane is hard to come by.