Advice for tape drive repair / maintenance

Over the weekend, I got out two old DC-600 tape drives out of storage - a Wangtek and an Archive. Only the Wangtek has a SCSI-to-QIC24 interface board, but I think I can use that on either drive (the board may in fact be originally from the Archive drive anyways). Anyways, after a quick visual inspection and wiping some dust off, I did try it with an old DC-600 tape cartridge - one that I knew was not important. It loaded OK and I started an attempt to image the tape to a file. About 1/4 into the tape something started vibrating, quickly escalating and before I could do anything, the tape stopped. Result: rubber goo on the plastic roller that drives the DC-600 cartridge drive belt, some on the tape itself, and the tape shows deformation (wavy) on the top half. I had to toss it. The drive itself: the rubber roller driving the aforementioned plastic roller had melted. Clearly visible is the area where the rubber meets the cartridges' roller - the rubber is notched. Furthermore the rubber roller is no longer cylindrical. Luckily there seems to be no other damage to the drive - no rubber seems to have been deposited on the R/W head. Any idea what could have caused this and how to prevent it? I now have two options: I can move the SCSI-to-QIC24 interface to the Archive drive, but I want to make sure that the same doesn't happen there. The other option is to remove the melted rubber roller and steal the one from the Archive drive. The mechanisms of the drives are different (the Archive has a lever mechanism, whereas the Wangtek has a spring-loaded push mechanism) so it's hard for me to tell if I can even move the rubber roller. Is this maybe a component that can easily be obtained elsewhere? Any ideas? Joe.