Advice for tape drive repair / maintenance -is Earl Muntz-

Billy Pettit wrote: There is an interesting post later in this thread that links to an article from Popular Electronics about Muntz. I scrounged around LA when I first got here in 1976, and ran across the Muntz store in Huntington Beach. It was on the loop of places that was interesting to stop and visit when visiting junk stores (this is my justification for not being totally off topic and boring). They had stereo equipment and TV sets in one part of the store, and odds and ends in another storefront. One could find surplus at one time there, of all sorts, but later it tended to be just audio stuff. One of the last things I saw there was when Technicolor had built up a single video cassette recorder / monitor unit, which was quite a nice package. Before Muntz quit showing up there, they were selling a kit with a big Fresnel lens and a screen, and a kit to mount your TV set upside down, so you could have "projection TV" with your brightness turned all the way up. Also good to visit was ACP, Marvac (pre move), Wright hardware (before Wright family sold out). to see what sorts of gizmos were there. I figured I was very privileged to have the opportunity to visit with Mr. Muntz as much as I did, as he was just an ordinary guy to visit with, not what one would have ever expected. Jim