Destructive Imaging of DECTAPE II Media

[Al Kossow]

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.