Fun with TK50's

Well, in my adventures with this MicroVax II and it's associated TK50, I have learned a few things about these critters: TK50 Facts: A TK50 drive has phillips head screw-heads on both reels (underneath, through hole in board for supply/cartridge reel, and in the center of the take up reel on the top). This allows you to manually rewind a tape that's jammed in the drive. When you rewind a tape that's been stuck in the drive for who-knows-how-many years, it won't necessarily load the next time. Some portions of the tape were wrapped unevenly and dragging inside the cartridge (you can feel it, pusing in on the reel from beneath the cartridge). It's possible to manually wind the entire tape out of the cartridge in order to fix this, using only a phillips head screwdriver. And provided you cleaned the drive, it'll even rewind when power it back up. Said cartridge won't actually hold data again, however. (Can anyone say shoeshine?) Tape cartridge design hasn't changed much. DLT III tapes look almost identical, and would fit if it wasn't for a plastic tab on the left of the tape. Tape cartridges are so identical, in fact, that you can disassemble your dud TK50, and move the bottom part of the shell over to a DLT III cartridge, allowing you to insert it into a TK50 drive. As clever as this seems, it doesn't work at all. Not that I really expected it to, TK50's are 350 orsted, DLT III's are like 1540 orsted. The media is very, very different. I just wanted to see what would happen. In case you're curious, such a tape will thead up, load, then give an error. The tape won't properly rewind and unload either, you have to do it manually. You't think that the designers would have thought of this, and implemented some system of preventing you a plastic tab or something. Oh, wait... A TK50 cartridge makes a rather thick, but serviceable, coaster. Just in case anyone else wanted to know :) -Ian