24 Jan
2022
24 Jan
'22
7:27 p.m.
On 1/24/22 4:25 PM, David Gesswein via cctech wrote:
On Sun, Jan 23, 2022 at 03:09:53PM -0800, Gary Oliver
wrote:
As to the real reason I was doing this: Most of my tapes are un-boxed
and have suffered being in a dusty area (before I got them) with the
dust forming a sort of 'crust' on the outside of the tape.? It's only on
the first wrap or so, but it's enough that it keeps those handy vinyl
cohesive tapes from sticking.? For that reason, I was trying to find
something to clean of this dusty gunk so the vinyl strip would hold the
tape into a spooled condition. It was the side-effect of this effort
that lead me to the discovery if this "removable layer" on the DECtape.
BTW, does anyone know of a source for these vinyl strips.? My old ones
are 10 mil blue very-flexible vinyl without any adhesive. They rely only
on the cohesive properties of vinyl-to-a-non-porous surface.? I tried
using some of the 'dry vinyl' sheets from Cricut (the plastic decal
printer company.)? They have a couple of colors without adhesive that
they call "window cling" but they aree only 4 mills thick and a bit
flimsy, though so-far they are holding ok.
-Gary
--
-Gary
Taking the bits of tape, I exposed them to
various concentrations of
isopropanol/water (from about 25% to 99% iso) and found than in all cases,
some of the data side of the tape came off on the wipe.? The remaining tape
fragment appears intact - the brown oxide was still there but both sides
were now the same color, rather than the data side being darker (as were all
my tapes before the test.)
I had done the careful test to find something safe to clean DECtape. One
time I grabbed the wrong bottle and that removed the coating. Tape was now
totally unreadable in that location. Didn't have any luck with cleaning
helping data errors so stopped trying. This was a long time ago so I don't
remember if my incorrect cleaning result matched your description.