Re: Cursor mag and archiving tapes

From: Justin <shadow_at_darksideresearch.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:55:43 -0500
Message-Id: <AAD36E24-DF9E-4688-ACCF-89B5E25D486F@darksideresearch.com>
It's a ghetto hack, but a pencil with a hexagonal cross section is an easy tool to use for manually winding a tape.  If you are getting some sticking, you can try freeing it manually by gently twisting the pencil inserted into the empty side.

On Feb 14, 2012, at 15:46 , Ethan Dicks wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Luke Crook <luke@balooga.com> wrote:
>> Some of my tapes are old and sticking.  The three C2N's that I have
>> are unable to turn the spindles at all.
>> 
>> Has anyone else had this problem?  Is there a solution?
> 
> If the tapes are truly sticking, you probably have degraded binder and
> may not be able to recover parts of those tapes.  In the world of
> 9-Track tape recovery, those are often baked to drive off adhesive
> volatiles, then run *once* through a reconstructed digitizing tape
> drive then the analog waveforms parsed because the oxide typically
> falls off in hunks, never to be re-read.
> 
> If you aren't having binder issues, one thing to do is to re-tension
> the tape - run it from end to end in one pass to repack the tape
> loosely.  Be careful about the ending tension - some tape drives have
> a stiff spring to click the tape off at the end.  One thing that
> breaks down over time is the leader/tape splice.  You'll have a tape
> that you now have to crack open to read.


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Received on 2012-02-15 00:00:03

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