J.J. alerted me to this thread. Sorry to make myself rare here, but life with a six-year-old, a book contract pressing on my back, lousy moods from three months without a single day of sunshine...
As to capsule cleaning of Neumann large diaphragm capsules:
In general, gold sputtering is very lightly attached to the Mylar membrane, and will come off super-easy when triggered mechanically,as by a brush. This is especially true for contaminated membrane surfaces, where a brush, even a very soft one, will drag and scratch hard particles into the gold and remove it quickly.
So, in principle, the advice to just sprinkle some harmless fluid like distilled water on the diaphragm, swill it around a bit and toss it off, is not bad, except:
most Neumann capsules have a pressure relief hole, a tiny needle prick, towards the edge of the membrane. Any liquid deposited on the surface of the membrane will be sucked into the deep, mystical spaces of the backplate behind it, and that liquid will henceforth become inaccessible to most simple drying efforts, and lead to loss of the high insulation resistance between diaphragm and back plate, which in turn leads to thunderous discharges of a collapsed/shorted capacitor.
In addition, when I see the kind of contamination your capsule shows, I pretty much know that these large blobs will not come off without the gold going too. (Notice the rainbow-like discoloration on some of the blobs: deterioration and chemical conversion has already set in.)
One more note about the K47 your pictures show clearly: someone messed with this capsule, and I am not sure whether it even has the original Neumann diaphragms. There is a clear lacquer sloppily smeared over every of the 12 diaphragm ring screws which is not of Neumann origin. Normally this is done when the ring had been off and the screws resealed. (Neumann only uses a tiny bit of a sealer to affix the position of each screw)
Now to the Church specs: lots of info on my forum. (I feel like a pimp stealing customers...)
What is a MUST to be found on any authentic Church mic:
* Genuine Neumann M7 or K47
* GE 5-Star 6072 tube
* Triad transformer (I still can't figure out from your JGPs where yours is??)
* Genuine Neumann U47 (tube) head basket, modified for Church's purposes.
Best regards,
Klaus Heyne