Wanted, Papertape Reader for Archiving Tapes

I don't have a reader, or tapes that I need to read, but I've had some conversations with people who do. Tape readers are not that hard to find but then you have to worry about interfacing. I've seen a few with RS232 output, that would be easy (just tie them to an RS232->USB adapter). The concern I can see with many of them is that they tend to be built for speed, not for gentle handling. So you might see stepper motor drive, or fast spinning capstans plus brake blocks. Readers that can do 1000 cps and stop before the next character are impressive but not quite what we want here. Stepper motors are not quite as rough but still they accelerate and decelerate the tape for every frame, and typically they pull on the feed holes with a sprocket wheel. If I needed to build one I'd probably construct a tape guide, adjustable to different tape widths (minimally 5, 7 or 8 track but perhaps 6 and 2 as well just for grins). Add the usual photocells. For transport, either just a driven takeup reel, or a capstan type drive. In either case, drive with a servomotor that's ramped up slowly and goes no faster than 100 cps or so. Then just capture the analog output signals from the 9 photocells and do the data recovery in software from those waveforms. For the data format, my answer would be to capture each tape frame as 8 bits of binary data; decoding is then a further post-processing step. paul