Hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I kind of had to pack up and move. Moving is a pain, but our new place is big enough to hold all our stuff. That means I’m encountering unfinished projects that have been in storage.
Back in Iowa, spring is the time for yard sales. While looking for hand tools for the maker space, I found a man selling his late wife’s record collection. Looking through the titles, it was a great collection of 70’s and 80’s rock. I bought the whole thing for what I thought was a good price. As soon as I got home, I realized it was a bad decision.
I know what you’re thinking: PJ, you didn’t own a single BTO album before you bought this collection, and now you have all their greatest hits! How could this be a bad decision? Well, as soon as I popped the trunk to unload my haul, I was overwhelmed with the smell of cigarette smoke. I could smell that it was kind of smoky when I went to the man’s basement to look at the records, but it really didn’t seem too powerful while I was down there. I think being in a space that wasn’t smoky at all made the smell of the records really stand out.
So what to do? A record store wasn’t likely to buy the records that smoky, so I decided to see if I could get the smell out. I put the records in garbage bags with charcoal filters and then put them into boxes. Those went into the storage unit for maybe a year and a half, until the move. And when we got to Florida? Well, let’s say I could tell which boxes had records because I could smell them right through the plastic and cardboard.
So I decided on a more active remediation: I planned to blow filtered air over the records for a long time to see if I could get the smell out. My theory was that filtered air would be better able to dissolve and carry away the smoke particles in the records. My wife made the excellent recommendation of using the Blueair air purifier we already owned rather than building something new. So I bought a new particle and carbon filter for the air purifier, put a box on top with a wire file holder to keep the records upright and let the fan do the work.
How effective was it? After 24 hours of blowing on any particular record, it would smell well enough to have in the house. For a while. What I found was that after a few days of blowing on other records, the smell would return to processed records. I interpreted this as the smell working its way out from deep in the paper. So I put them back through another 24 hours of blowing. At that point the smell seemed to be more stable.
I did find that it was a good idea to pull the inner sleeve and replace it if it was generic. If it was a printed inner sleeve that I wanted to keep, I would air it out separate from the outer sleeve.