
Cleaning LPs with a bottle of wood glue is hardly an intuitive way to get more mileage out of that bottle of glue in your workshop or clean a beloved LP. The results, however, are quite impressive.

Over at the music and audio-gear enthusiast site Audio Karma, one industrious user decided to test the old rumors in the audiophile community that you could clean a record with wood glue. The photo above shows a before and after shot of a record he cleaned using the technique. Why would you want to use this method? The before photo shows the results of using a commercial cleaner at home—not very impressive—and getting LPs professionally cleaned can cost $2-3 and up per album.


He provides great instructions on the Audio Karma site—and even updates us on various glues and techniques he's been using since he shared the method!—but we dug up an old video on YouTube to show you the technique in action.

So how does it work? In short wood glue and the material LP albums are so chemically similar that the wood glue can't bind to the record. It can however bind to everything else on the record which includes oil, dust, dirt, fungus, the crayon your nephew rubbed on it, and so on. You're essentially giving your record a spa wax and ripping all the impurities off of it with the glue. We'd highly recommend testing the technique on some beater LPs from the thrift store before trying it on your more valuable albums to work the kinks out of your technique and get the glue laying process down pat.

Have your own clever use—music-related or otherwise—to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Wood Glue as Vinyl Cleaner