Radio Shack Tape Recorder Head Cleaner (Fluid)

A break from actual cassettes today. This bottle of Radio Shack (Tandy) Tape Recorder Head Cleaner fluid, from 1993, was actually part of a kit. In addition to this product, the kit contained a bottle of Head Lubricant of equal size, and ten long-reach swabs. In the year this was bought, the price of the kit was £2.69.

The Tandy range included quite a variety of maintenance products and accessories for audio cassette users in ’93. A Cassette Deck Demagnetizer and Cleaner, priced at £9.99, topped the range of maintenance artefacts. There was also a fluid plus cleaning tape kit at £1.99, cleaning fluid alone at 99p (different bottle from this one), a cleaning tape alone at 99p, a pack of swabs at 99p, and a replacement fluid pen at £1.99.

Among the more specialised products, was a Cassette Fast Winder (£3.49), with which you could rewind your tapes by hand whilst your cassette deck was still in use. There was also a Tape Splicing Kit (£3.99) which catered for both audio and video tape. The inevitable variety of storage solutions was also offered of course.

Leda Cassette Head Cleaner

Here’s a rare old sight, which might bring back memories for a few of those who can recall the early 1980s. This is a Leda Cassette Head Cleaner. Pretty standard in design for a compact cassette-enclosed head cleaning tape. Ten tick-boxes on the orange paper label, indicating that the life of this unit was (at least intended to be) restricted to ten cleaning operations. It’s not apparent from the photo but you can see from impressions in the paper that the boxes have actually been ticked. It’s just that the cassette was used so long ago that the biro has faded to white!

TDK HCL-11 Head Cleaner Cassette

One of the more recent head cleaning cassettes. This TDK HCL-11 is from the late 1990s, and features TDK’s RC-II Rigid Construction Mechanism. All sorts of recommendations would be made by purveyors of recording devices in relation to cleaning, demagnetising or whatever, but running one of these every so often would, in my experience, keep a basic tape deck or tape recorder working without hitch. Home multi-trackers, however, needed more care, and with those, I found head cleaning tapes to have little impact when sound quality was starting to suffer.