29 Jan
2015
29 Jan
'15
2:51 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 12:18 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 1/29/15 10:55 AM, Ali wrote:
The only rubber I can remember being used in the tape path of an M4
Data 9914 is on the tach roller. I had a nice working 9914
(800/1600/6250) until the thin rubber coating around the metal tach
roller lost the necessary friction properties against the moving tape
to correctly sense its speed. Quite a shame to loose a nice drive to
such a simple rubber failure. Maybe I could have found some way to fix
the problem, but I no longer have that drive.
is it that all
tape drives (including ones manufactured now are ticking time bombs?
Tape is the bane of my existence.
All of the rubber parts will eventually soften or crack. I've mostly
seen softening on QIC drives, and roller cracking on helical DAT or Exabyte
drives. If you look on the audio tape deck forums, they claim a pinch roller
is only good for maybe five years of life. The youngest drives I use
regularly
are 25+ years old. A TU58, for example, came out in the late 70's.