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WARNING: Clear QIC Tape Bands



That's after sitting parked a couple months. I have a Dysan doing it too. The Dysan had been re-banded with a boiled 3M band and run for years like that with no shedding. I have another Dysan with a green Plastiband in it which is also fine, minimal/no shed. So, I think we may need to re-evaluate if the clear Amazon cheap "plastibands" are perhaps totally incompatible with tape.

I know, I know..."just use the band to get data off." But I want to *run* QICs without having to destroy them constantly.

And, I've just added a page/link to this thread on my QICReader.com website, thank you Glitch for reporting this issue.

 
I believe you but sadly I got other experience.

Some month ago I ordered plastic bands as shown at https://www.vaxbarn.com/qic-tape-data-recovery
and put the 6" into a jam jar for some weeks as I had 1st to bake some tapes.

The plastic bands where broken, maybe it was a bad clone of the original bands,
Off course I was pissed of so I used some bands from good old memorex tape I tested a week ago.
With it I save 3 QIC tapes error free for my Siemens Sinix MX300 system.

So why did the new plastic bands fail?
 

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I just checked a couple of tapes where I installed white Mobilion bands a number of years ago. Nothing had happened to the tapes luckily. But I removed the bands to be on the safe side.

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Those plastibands age badly, so it depends on how long they've sat on a distributor's shelf. LIke Al, my goal is not to make tapes usable past retrieving what's been written on them. After that, it's the bin.
 
I just checked a couple of tapes where I installed white Mobilion bands a number of years ago. Nothing had happened to the tapes luckily. But I removed the bands to be on the safe side.
I need to order some of those, apparently that's what folks on sun-rescue are using with good success.
 
The plastic bands where broken, maybe it was a bad clone of the original bands,
Could be, the green Plastibands I put in QIC cartridges around two years ago are still OK. I'm using them in tapes that actually get used, one of which is my "test unknown QIC drives with this" cartridge.
 
You can try, but I've never noticed a real problem with shedding on most QIC carts. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but that it's less frequent than on open-reel media. It's the tension band mostly.
 
I processed a couple of hundred 80's carts that were stored poorly just before Covid, and it did help running them through the food dehydrator with the tape wound on a single reel and just the base plate so it was completely open.
Then, retension, clean heads, rinse repeat.
And doing the cloth over the pins trick to keep the tape from sticking on them when it serpentined.
I've got a backlog again, and am not looking forward to it.
 
Open-reel media experiences sticking quite often. If it's a short reel, after baking, I'll lube the head and guides with a high-grade pure silicone lube (e.g. CRC) and limit tape travel to one direction. If that doesn't work, I put the tape on the cleaning machine and apply a thin film of cyclomethicone to the entire length of tape (I use a felt wick applicator) and then read it immediately. I generally can tell if there's a sticking problem while the tape is loading by carefully listening. One reason that I don't like drives that conceal tape operation.

The biggest problem that comes up is when someone tries to power through this on their own drive. (SCSI drives are the worst because you have no immediate control over tape motion). Strips the oxide right off the base very often--and then there's no recovery of that possible.
 
Get used to it, Al. Only rivaled by "I found a floppy drive and tried to read my old floppies, but they kept making this squealing noise.
Even today, I'm dealing with 9 track tapes that have failed (unnamed ) someone's drive that have big sections of clear base on them. "See-through" tapes--got all of the dirty brown stuff cleaned off, finally.
 
I wonder who thought of using cyclomethicone...
For a time the audio tape folks talked about using Nu Finish car polish (using only the clear fraction, leaving the abrasive settle out. I never could get that to work for me, but some swore/swear by it;
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I'm very hesitant to even consider using this on customer's tapes because it's a permanent modification of the original. D6 at least evaporates with time, leaving things as they were.
 
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If the abrasives are large enough to see settle, then they should be able to be filtered out as well.
 
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