Reel-to-Reel care?

From: Nico de Jong <nico_at_farumdata.dk>
Date: Tue Dec 9 10:30:30 2003

From: "Ken Campbell" <ken_at_fraserhouse.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 4:37 PM
Subject: Reel-to-Reel care?


> Greetings,
>
> Does anyone have some "care and feeding" tips for vintage reel-to-reel
> tape drives? I've recently purchased a couple nice 9 Track drives, and
> want to make sure they (and the media) last as long as possible.

My personal feelings regarding reel to reel tapes (I've been using them
since 1969) are as follows:
- when cleaning, dont forget the parts just before the read/write head. on
some drives, it is just a "knife" scraping the shit away, other drives have
a "vacuum cleaner"
- when I was an operator, we used to clean tape drives every 8 hours, at the
start of a shift, whether they needed it or not. The system was an IBM
360/40, with 6-7 tapedrives, and they saw heavy use (e.g. a tapesort taking
4-5 hours....)
- when tapes are loaded, they are tensioned. This condition along makes
mounting for fun a big nono.
What you could do, is mounting some scratch tapes, on which you dont save
data for a long time.

On the longer term, tapes must be rewritten every 2nd or 3rd year, in order
to avoid crosstalk between the layers.
You should also check the flanges (?) for being straight ( not bent ). I've
often see "bent" flages, which were so bad that the tape was not vertical
with respect to the flanges, but at a 30-40 degree angle. It also made a
horrible noise, so you will notice it.

You should also take care with respect to the tape capacity / type. Most
drives handle 1600 and/or 6250 bpi tapes, but 3200 can also be found. 800
bpi tapes are very old indeed, but I still encounter them regularly.
When you write e.g. a 6250 density, dont use tapes certified for less. The
oxide used is different (but I'm not a specialist on that). The problem is
roughly comparable with writing DD floppies in a HD drive or v.v.

Storage : always keep tapes in containers. Period. (apart from demo tapes,
which you can do without)
Canisters should be stored upright, so the tape itself doesnt "sag" to the
flange.

Now let's see who disagrees with me ....

Nico
Received on Tue Dec 09 2003 - 10:30:30 GMT