« runner forgot to mark a segment? | Main | r.i.p. akai »
April 9, 2006
vhs hell iii: somebody shoot me
this time it was the mega man 3 etc tape from freddy andersson (frezy_man).
attempting to fast forward and rewind the tape failed with tape spewing into the machine (the same thing that always happens no matter what goes wrong). i carefully extracted the tape and disassembled it. this was the scene (click the thumbnails for larger versions):
a third of the left tape reel had broken off and become caught in the rest of it, locking the tape in place. i carefully extracted the piece of the reel. then i noticed that another third of the reel was broken at the center in both places and was about ready to come off as well (it was only being held on by the outside of the wheel). i decided to try to use mailing tape to hold the wheel together better while i attempted to capture the run. i cut tiny pieces of mailing tape and applied them to the two broken center joints of the source reel.
i was able to capture the mm3 run, but i was careful not to fast forward the tape except while playing it (what i tell you to never do!), lest the precarious situation detonate. i've never replaced a tape reel before, and i wouldn't know the right way to go about attaching the tape to the new reel, not to mention how boring it would get winding an olympic-length european tape off by hand, so i was glad to avoid having to do that.
and the fun doesn't stop here! frezy_man forgot to tell me about this tmnt run he wanted to submit that is located near the beginning of the same tape, so the damaged reel will now have to take most of the tape back up ...
Posted by njahnke at April 9, 2006 5:29 PM
Comments
On the off chance you have to replace a reel in the future, there's a small tab in the core that holds the tape to the reel. I can't remember whether you have to slide the tab out or if pulling sufficiently hard on the tape will pop it out. Either way, reinserting it just involves laying the tape over the hole and popping the tab back into place over it.
Posted by: andyo 
at April 22, 2006 4:38 AM
wow, thanks for the info. :) i can't believe there's someone out there who has more experience with vhs than me who actually reads my blog! rocking!
Posted by: nate at April 22, 2006 7:40 AM
I've been there, man. I once had an old tape (14 years) that I tried to play, and I can't remember specifics, but the VCR was acting very strangely and wasn't showing a a picture. When I examined the tape I saw that the part where the tape binds to the reel had been jerked out or snapped! I disassembled the cassette, and used some scotch tape to reattach the non-magnetic part of the tape back to the reel, then realised that I had lost one of the small pieces to the cassette, so I had to find another old cassette to tear apart for repacement parts (found an old tape of my mom's that had 10 year old soap operas on it) and reassembled it and immediately set to work on my first VHSRip. And here I am today, a slave to my capture card, and soon to be murderer of this F#$%ing Piece of $#!+ DVR. Never use any product by Scientific Atlanta!
...and have a nice day.
Post-preview edit: I shopuld probably mention that I capture from my Digital Video Recorder, and that it is very uncooperative.
Posted by: OmegaWarrior at April 25, 2006 11:06 PM
i once hoped that dvrs would be useful for recording speed runs, but unfortunately they always seem to have lag introduced due to the timeshifting feature, so you would need to split the signal before going into the dvr, and it would be pretty ghetto.
Posted by: nate at April 27, 2006 11:32 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)