Cleaning 16mm Prints

[Will2]

I have a bunch of old 16mm prints (Casablanca, Philadelphia Story, Arsenic and Old Lace, ect.) Mostly B&W that I want to do some maintenance on. Like fix any old spices and clean the film in general.

My local lab has a film cleaning system that they run their negatives through after processing. The tech says he's done it with print stocks for some amazing results.

My question is if it is safe for this old b&w print stock to be cleaned by one of these machines? It's the standard film cleaning machines that labs use...don't know all the details on how it works other than a few rollers that lift dirt and a liquid that is used to clean it.

Any ideas?

[woods01]

Yes, the negative is more prone to scratching/damage than your prints are. Plus chances are your prints have seen decades of dust, scratches and bad splices, they won't look any worse! If you're going to do this, then fix all your old splices. Check with the lab if tape or cement splices are okay with their system. However there are several DIY cleaning products on the market that you might find is a lot cheaper than using a lab.

[Will2]

Just got them back and I can already see a big difference. They replaced most of the bad tape splices with glue slices (made me get a hot splicer after seeing how good they are) and put it through the cleaning machine.

[slashmaster]

Yes, the negative is more prone to scratching/damage than your prints are. Plus chances are your prints have seen decades of dust, scratches and bad splices, they won't look any worse! If you're going to do this, then fix all your old splices. Check with the lab if tape or cement splices are okay with their system. However there are several DIY cleaning products on the market that you might find is a lot cheaper than using a lab.

What? Negatives are more prone to scratches? Why would this be?

[Will2]

I think dust, dirt and scratches just show up more in negatives when printing or transferring. It's probably easier for prints to get scratches because they are used so much more. Projectors are mean machines and most negatives are handled like they precious gold.