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Archiving QIC tapes

E

eeguru

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I have nearly a half dozen quarter inch cartridge tapes that need dumping. The biggest challenge so far has been finding a drive with solid capstan. I have 10+ drives (mostly Wang) and they've all turned to mush. However I did find a Sun QIC drive with solid rollers last week. So I was hoping I could dump a back-stock of tapes I've collected on the shelf.

But the drives aren't the only issue. Belts and rollers in the carts themselves wear out. In the past (10+ years ago now), I've had some limited luck transplanting the hardware from a new cart to an old one in order to read it in a drive. So after I found this working QIC drive, I tried some write/read test runs of NOS tapes I had on the shelf before I used them for organ donors. I tried 1 tape from 3 different NOS batches. Between 2 and 30 second of motor activity, all the belts snapped! So it's either this particular lone working drive is being rough on tapes, or the NOS DC600A stock is starting to brittle out as bad as the old tapes.

Any suggestions on how to a) refurbish the older tape drives, b) recondition old tapes to work in either this lone working drive or a reconditioned one, or c) any service I can send my current tape stock to be dumped and archived?

Thanks
 
Failure of belts on NOS tape is a known problem. Try finding 150 meg tapes which have different belts.

I've not had any luck using plastibands as 1/4" replacements (too narrow) or rehydrating old belts with warm water.

I've given up on archive and wangtek as drives and just use tanberg, preferably first or second generation imbedded SCSI.
So far, I've not had any problems with the capstans.
 
I've replaced several capstans with silicone vacuum tubing (there was a post about 2 years ago from me with photos) with good success.

Belts are another story. I know how they were made, but getting enough interest to set up a replacement jig seems to be lacking. Plastibands, even the large 6" ones just don't last--and age in the packaging. Success there is hit or miss.
 
My biggest ongoing challenge has been the residue a decomposing belt will leave on the tape. It drags over the head, and will migrate readily, eventually creating a big headache. I know that Chuck likes cyclomethicone as an ablative coating, but I'm still hoping to find some way to remove it directly (or prevent it from sticking to the tape in the first place).
 
Is the end of tape sensor dirty or broken? I think the drive will snap a tape rewinding if that is messed up or dirty.
 
No I don't believe it's a problem with range sensors. To test the tapes, I loaded a new freshly peeled-shrink-wrap tape into the drive and started an uncompressed tar on a Sun SS20. All 3 tapes would start writing successfully. I had the cover off the drive and observed the rollers engage and the reels spin-up. They would all break a short duration in during a successful data-stream.

I've bought a Tandberg 3660 150MB drive off eBay today with some NOS 6150 carts. I'll see if that will work next once it arrives. Thanks for all the suggestions.
 
Al Kossow said:
Make sure you retension the tape first. 'mt -retension' which goes to the EOT then rewinds.
Click to expand...

Ah. I took the AT&T SVR3.2.3 386 tape I recently took a photo of - one of the tapes i need to dump - apart to check the condition. I noticed the spool on which the majority of tape is wound had 'settled'. It seems like 30 years on a shelf with entropy has caused the wound tape to sag un-evenly around the spool in an effective warped disk. Thus as I hand wound to the other spool, it would wind evenly on the uptake reel but not back on the storage reel. I supposed this is why it must be retensioned?

The good news is it looks like the belt in this tape is in good shape! yay!
 
Um, be sure that the belt has adequate tension. It's not uncommon for a failing belt to lose tension before it finally breaks. This can result in mess when a drive attempts to spin the tape. The Tandberg 3600 series is at least a slower drive than the more modern SLT drives, so your chances of not mangling the tape are a bit better.
 
Al Kossow said:
Failure of belts on NOS tape is a known problem. Try finding 150 meg tapes which have different belts.

I've not had any luck using plastibands as 1/4" replacements (too narrow) or rehydrating old belts with warm water.

I've given up on archive and wangtek as drives and just use tanberg, preferably first or second generation imbedded SCSI.
So far, I've not had any problems with the capstans.
Click to expand...

I've all three incarnations here, tandberg, wangtek and archive. I've succesfully replaced the capstans with the right size of rubber pipe, automotive pipes do have a suitable size (I think sometimes I needed two different sizes coaxially inserted into the metallic part of the capstan. I like the archive's one, I could change a 320M drive into a 525M one by upgrading the firmware (new EPROM), I don't know why some older models didn't want to use 6525 tapes but only up to 6320 ones anyway.
I haven't find a cure for belts failing, so I stopped some time ago using these tapes even for backup of my vintage systems. I have several dozens of all kind of tapes around, probably I should try to archive their contents too (there're quite a few installation images of SunOS for example, but even quite some SysV software and backups of Olivetti LSX-3000 series.
So few time...

Frank
 
I also used automotive high-pressure fuel hose to refurbish the roller on an Archive 2150S I acquired recently. Fortunately the belt was still good.
To cut the rubber tube to length I pushed a portion over a drill bit, lubed it with dish soap and slit it with a box cutter while spinning on a drill motor.

IMG_1889.jpg
 
I tried fuel line and found it difficult to cut and anything but radially symmetrical.

Here's my fix using silicone vacuum hose that I've used on both Archive and Wangtek drives. A tight fit and no glue necessary.

W2dOdTM.jpg
 
Since the End of Tape markers are physical, you can bulk erase them, then use the host's tape utilities to retension and prepare the tape for use again.
 
CuriousMarc just released the second video in a series of repairing HP 3964A/3968A analogue reel-to-reel data recorders. The interesting parts here is that he mentioned having a pinch roller remanufactured by someone (can't remember the details), and also a comment suggested creating a budget pinch roller by using the type of rubber tape that looks like electrical tape at first glance, but where the rubber "melts" onto adjacent rubber when you roll it onto something, to form the right size rubber wheel, and when it has cured (give it a day or so) then grind it down to get an even surface. (Without grinding it down you'd of course end up with a wheel that's thicker wherever you cut the end of the rubber "tape" thing). Can't remember the English name for this type of "tape", in Swedish it's called "Vulktape" or "Vulktejp".

Re archiving tapes: If the goal is to just read the tapes once then a somewhat convoluted but probably also reliable solution would be to fit a suitable data head onto a regular audio reel-to-reel recorder and spool the QIC tape onto reel-to-reel spools. Or rather this would work if both tapes are close enough in width. IIRC both are 1/4" so should work, but it might be worth testing with a not that valuable tape first. Also note that reel to reel recorders usually have the heads on the "inner" side, and for the tension mechanism and whatnot to work you'd probably want to mount your data head on the same side as the existing audio heads (or replace an audio head). Thus you probably have to spool the tape the opposite way as compared to how it's spooled in a QIC cartridge (unless it's spooled "backwards").

(Said HP analogue recorders actually have the heads on the "outside" but it also mounts the spools "the wrong way" as compared to almost every other reel to reel recorder).

If anyone decides to go ahead modifying a reel-to-reel recorder and possibly creating your own read electronics it's worth remembering that different QIC tape formats seems to have used different amount of tracks. In particular DC6150/6250 uses more tracks than the older formats/tapes, and for the older tapes there were more than one format / more than one amount of tracks. (The oldest seem to use four tracks, so should be readable using regular audio heads (although actual four channel audio heads are rarer than two channel four track heads, albeit not super rare as they were used in prosumer music studio recording setups and quadraphonic audio recorders)).

Also: Thinking that the amount of tracks question might play in to the readibility of lower capacity tapes than what a particular drive is intended for. IIRC you can usually read DC600 tapes with a DC6150 drive, but since the amount of tracks doesn't mach I assume that the signal quality is slightly worse than using a drive intended solely for DC600(/450/300) tapes. Might be worth keeping in mind of a tape is somewhat stubborn to read. Dropouts would be way less of an issue with a head that covers the full width of a track, than reading the tape using a narrower head which would be the case when using a DC6150 drive with a DC600 tape. (Compare with that you get a better audio quality when playing a two track tape using a two track head even though you will hear the audio correctly when using a two channel four track head)
 
MiaM said:
CuriousMarc just released the second video in a series of repairing HP 3964A/3968A analogue reel-to-reel data recorders. The interesting parts here is that he mentioned having a pinch roller remanufactured by someone (can't remember the details), and also a comment suggested creating a budget pinch roller by using the type of rubber tape that looks like electrical tape at first glance, but where the rubber "melts" onto adjacent rubber when you roll it onto something, to form the right size rubber wheel, and when it has cured (give it a day or so) then grind it down to get an even surface. (Without grinding it down you'd of course end up with a wheel that's thicker wherever you cut the end of the rubber "tape" thing). Can't remember the English name for this type of "tape", in Swedish it's called "Vulktape" or "Vulktejp".
Click to expand...
Link please?
 
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