28 Jan
2015
28 Jan
'15
8:14 a.m.
On 1/28/15 1:51 AM, Christian Corti wrote:
The problem is that the band loses its elasticity and
gets longer. The black PU based bands can be made functional again with the method that I
described in a post some months ago (hot water). You may
try this method; actually you must use this method with all tapes that haven't been
used for some time. My experience even with NOS QIC cartridges from the 90s is that all
such bands have that problem
nowadays.
When I was working on this a couple of months ago, I had hundreds of old DC450/600/6150
carts to experiment on and I
sent out a message about the results. Short answer is bands from 300/450 and 600
aren't worth messing with. 6150 are
a slightly different formulation and are also a bit tighter. This seems to be true for all
of the larger capacity
carts beyond 150Mb as well. The 6150 bands either do not require the warm water treatment
or should be rehydrated at
significantly lower temperature/time. Since I disassemble and replace the bands when I
bake the tapes, it isn't a big
deal to change them out. I also posted a rather long post on how to put the bands on.
Like I said, I have a big batch of TU58 tapes that I need to process, so I'll
experiment with different brands of DC-100
sized tapes when I do it. I'm in the middle of setting up new lab space at CHM right
now, and as soon as that's done I'll
bump up the TU58 recovery in the queue. I know I have 730 tapes in the piles to do.