From: "Ken Campbell" <ken(a)fraserhouse.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 4:37 PM Subject: Reel-to-Reel care? My personal feelings regarding reel to reel tapes (I've been using them since 1969) are as follows: - when cleaning, dont forget the parts just before the read/write head. on some drives, it is just a "knife" scraping the shit away, other drives have a "vacuum cleaner" - when I was an operator, we used to clean tape drives every 8 hours, at the start of a shift, whether they needed it or not. The system was an IBM 360/40, with 6-7 tapedrives, and they saw heavy use (e.g. a tapesort taking 4-5 hours....) - when tapes are loaded, they are tensioned. This condition along makes mounting for fun a big nono. What you could do, is mounting some scratch tapes, on which you dont save data for a long time. On the longer term, tapes must be rewritten every 2nd or 3rd year, in order to avoid crosstalk between the layers. You should also check the flanges (?) for being straight ( not bent ). I've often see "bent" flages, which were so bad that the tape was not vertical with respect to the flanges, but at a 30-40 degree angle. It also made a horrible noise, so you will notice it. You should also take care with respect to the tape capacity / type. Most drives handle 1600 and/or 6250 bpi tapes, but 3200 can also be found. 800 bpi tapes are very old indeed, but I still encounter them regularly. When you write e.g. a 6250 density, dont use tapes certified for less. The oxide used is different (but I'm not a specialist on that). The problem is roughly comparable with writing DD floppies in a HD drive or v.v. Storage : always keep tapes in containers. Period. (apart from demo tapes, which you can do without) Canisters should be stored upright, so the tape itself doesnt "sag" to the flange. Now let's see who disagrees with me .... Nico

I recently received a Hewlett-Packard 7970A 9-track drive (circa 1971) which had been stored for years (perhaps decades) with tape reels mounted. The reels could not be removed from the hubs. It turned out the rubber compression ring on each hub (which is compressed outwards into the tape reel to hold the reel onto the hub) had sealed itself to the reel as a result of being left in the compressed state. The reels were sealed on well enough that pulling or prying them off was going to break the plastic reels. The hubs had to be dismantled to get access to the compression ring to break the seal. (Not too difficult on these units once you know how to do it, but in the absence of manuals I had to dismantle it to find out how I *should have* dismantled it :/ ) On a similar note, can someone comment on the long-term prognosis of 9-track tape? Is it still being manufactured or is everyone that still uses it relying on new-old-stock? Is the oxide coating stable if stored at the proper temp./humidity or does it turn flaky/icky after a few years regardless? (The tape that was left on this machine, once unwound a little ways, sticks to itself slightly and as it goes through the drive an oxide goo starts to build up which causes the tape to bind and chatter. Granted this may all be a result of the environment the unit was stored in (an airplane hanger I believe). ) -------------------- http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/eec