Are there M4 9914 9-track tape driver users on the list?

I acquired a couple of M4 9914 9-track tapes drives a while ago and finally got around to trying to do something useful with them. Never having used one before the first thing I did was just see if it would mount a tape ok. The first brand new tape I tried was sucked into the take-up reel ok and wound a few turns, then sucked all of the way back out, then the drive tried again before giving up with a N T U (No Take Up) error. I then tried a second brand new tape from a different vendor and got the same results. Then I went back into the garage and hefted (it's a workout) the second 9914 drive into my work area and tried both tapes on the second drive with the same result. Then I tried manually threading a tape onto the take-up reel while the drive was powered off and making sure that winding the take-up reel caused the supply reel to turn, then powered on the drive and got the same N T U error again. I looked in the manual and it said something about the N T U error occurring due to a lack of tach pulses. Then I looked at the tape path for what might be the tach sensor and guessed it was probably a metal roller near the take-up reel. I used a marker to put a dot on the top of the reel and noticed that it wasn't rotating when the tape was moving past it. I tried rotating this roller by hand and I could feel detents while rotating it and I assume it is attached to some type of rotary encoder. Now to the point posting this here, my questions are does anyone know if this roller/encoder needs any lubrication? If so, how? It felt somewhat stiff when I first tried rotating it and got a little easier to rotate the more I kept at it. And secondly, this roller did have a thin rubber coating which had turned to goo. I cleaned the goo off of the roller. If anyone else has seen this on a 9914 drive (I assume so, it was goo on both of mine) did they do anything about it? Is there a good way to re-rubber this roller? After cleaning the goo off of the tach roller and getting it to rotate a little more freely I did see it rotate when the tape was moving past it (wasn't sure if it would without the rubber) and now the 9914 will mount a tape most of the time. -Glen