Cause of Increased resistance ("drag") in VHS Cassettes

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What happens to the drag if you FF to the end and REW to the other end , to pack evenly , and then test for drag ?

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

General condition of the tape and how it's wound. Dust and other contaminants not visible to the naked eye collect on contact surfaces of the moving parts. No reel mystery (pun intended).

BTW, my tape repairs date back to the U-Matic days.

I was lead to believe, when I worked in the industry, that the problem was the slippery side of the tape, eventually lost it's surface with use, and the tape would bind from that point on.

I remember trying to transfer the tapes (3/4") to a new case to see if they would come back, but they would not. I did that to retrieve a program from a tape that ended up with a broken cartridge. The tape had been binding towards the the of the spool.

As luck would have it, I had a new tape that had been creased the entire length by a crumb stuck in it's path, so I combined the two to get the program back. I got at least one good play out of it, but I copied it to a new tape with that play. And yes it still had problems near the end of the tape, just as it did in it's original case. The only part I transferred were the two spools and the tape itself.

- Tim -

I 'm with the others - I have opened up older well-used cassettes and you can even see faint friction lines on the backside of the tape. get one old one for yourself and open the flap, within the first 5 minutes of the tape you should see what I mean- It's just wear and tear.

-B

On May 10, 8:46=A0am, snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net (Brad) wrote: > Hi, >

We play back _old_ (late '60s to late '70s) 2" quadruplex video tapes at work for restoration. The 2" tapes get sticky and will not roll through the transport - sometimes stopping after less than 1 second of play. We now routinely bake the tapes in a food dehydrator. The quad tapes get 13 hours at 135F and then play just fine. We've also done this with 1/4" and 1/2" audio tapes with good results.

You do not want to do this with a gas oven as the whole point of baking is to dry it out and one of the rsults of burning gas is water vapor. You also want the air circulating around the tape. For plastic case cassettes you might want to lower the temp to 125F so as to not warp the case.

GG

What kinds of programs are you restoring? Any of this perhaps available on YouTube? Or is it deadly dull stuff?

Peter Marshall, the host of the TV game show "Hollywood Squares," wrote in his autobiography that he had long thought that the overwhelming majority of episodes of that show had been long gone, that the tapes had been erased and/or destroyed. But one day somebody looking for something else in a videotape archive found a whole shelf full of 2" quad videotape masters for "Hollywood Squares." The tapes were just sitting there. Marshall wrote in his book that he thinks it was a case of "inheritance confusion," wherein the tapes had changed owners over the years... you know how companies keep buying and selling and merging. It was likely a matter of the present owners literally not knowing what they had. Some of these "lost" shows have since been shown on the Game Show Network (and, I presume, bumped over to more recent media).

Matt J. McCullar Arlington, TX

We play back _old_ (late '60s to late '70s) 2" quadruplex video tapes at work for restoration. The 2" tapes get sticky and will not roll through the transport - sometimes stopping after less than 1 second of play. We now routinely bake the tapes in a food dehydrator. The quad tapes get 13 hours at 135F and then play just fine. We've also done this with 1/4" and 1/2" audio tapes with good results.

On May 11, 12:09=A0pm, "Matt J. McCullar" wrote: > What kinds of programs are you restoring? =A0Any of this perhaps available on > YouTube? =A0Or is it deadly dull stuff?

I sincerely doubt anybody airs quads in real time anymore though they aren't troublesome at all if the tapes are baked first.

GG