Tektronix 4051

On 9 Nov 2007 at 16:19, Christian Corti wrote: Not too long ago, I went around and around with the good-intentioned folks at Imation about DC600 carts and dead belts. Ultimately, after some good efforts, they were unable to help. But they did furnish some valuable information--and cclister CRC dropped a key piece of the puzzle right into place. My Imation contact offered as to how the belts originate as rings punched out of a sheet of polyurethane (he allowed that there was some IP in the formulation that he wasn't at liberty to disclose). A special machine then takes the ring, "flips" it so that instead of a ring, you now have a belt and applies it to the loaded cartridge. At one time, Imation had a one-off manual ring applier, but that's apparently been consigned to the scrap pile for quite awhile. Beyond that, my contact said that it was humanly impossible to manually replicate the operation. Claude sent me a few "Plastibands" which are sold by office supply retailers as a replacement for rubber bands; the big advantage is that they don't degrade with exposure to light and atmospheric ozone. They come in two sizes--2 inch and 4 inch. The 2 inch variety works pretty well in DC-2000 size carts and the 4 inch can be made to work in DC-300/600/6150/6250 etc. carts. I wish the things were a bit wider, or that they came in a 6-inch size, but they do the job. The 2 inch size also works as a replacement drive belt just fine in the Amstrad 3" floppy drive--and will probably last a lot longer than the original. Back to the DC300s--you may find that the belt has done something else that's not quite so simple to solve. With time, the oxide formulation in at least some brands (Scotch is one that I've discovered) has bonded to the drive belt surface better than the mylar tape substrate. Thus, you'll find where the belt has contacted the medium during storage, you have some nice clear spots in the tape. I don't believe that process is reversible. I have a drive and controller that Don Maslin gave me supposedly from a Tek terminal of some sort. It's a Wangtek drive and a like-sized controller board with an 8085 on it. Interfaces on both ends are 50 conductor--if the computer side was something like SASI, it wouldn't surprise me--I've never had to use it. The pinch roller in the drive is in pretty bad shape now, though that could be dealt with without too much trouble, I imagine. I wonder if the drive-side interface isn't QIC-36, which would mean that there are PC-based controllers available for it. Cheers, Chuck