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| rjisinspired |
| Posted: Feb 5 2012, 04:33 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 1256
Member No.: 20008
Joined: 12-October 06
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Tomorrow I'll have to fess up to letting my friend know that one of his video tapes did a crash onto the floor and the side broke off into pieces. The take up spool doesn't move when in the VCR. I had inserted the tape into the VCR and a part of the plastic on the right was raised a bit and had to be broken off because it was lodged about the holder that holds the sides of the shell while the cassette is being loaded/ejected.
After I tell him what happened I'm going to try and attempt to surgically put the reels from the broken shell to a different one. How hard is this really to do?
The tape itself is fine, it's only the shell that is broken. |
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| mayhem |
| Posted: Feb 6 2012, 05:04 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 62
Member No.: 24668
Joined: 13-December 08
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As memory serves this is really easy, I did this with a couple damaged tapes back in the mid 90's, yknow, when people
actually used video tape, ahem ;-)
Considering this is virtualdub's forum, I woulda thought you'd have captured
anything from videotape into .avi or .mpg by now. But as you said its a friends
so I would guess you're doing some capping for someone else.
As far as I recall you can just lift off the tape cover on the top of the tape
by pulling the little studs out of the holes that hold it in place, then its just
about five little screws and it should pull clean apart, best to do that
while its lying flat on a table to prevent the spools from flying out and
unravelling. The other thing likely to fall out are the rollers, that on
cheaper tapes (most, nowadays) aren't secured to anything and
are just short plastic tubes sitting on a stem with only the sides
of the tape case to keep them from sliding off. Which is why this
needs to be done on a flat surface and not while held in your hands.
Thats probably the most risky part, you don't want the parts flying out
or the tape itself, as it will get all kinked to hell when you try to wind it
back up,etc. Theres also the break flapper which is held by a spring,
if that falls out it'll be a bit tricker to fix but in most cases you'll be
using a new/other case that already has that in there, and are
just dealing with moving the spools over.
After lifting them out just transplant into a waiting new shell. When it
happened to me I simply dismantled some tape i didn't care about,
or a blank one, and had it standing by ahead of time, that also gives
you practice in opening one and removing the tape spools.
After that its just a matter of correctly positioning a small section of
the tape itself thru the two guide rollers on one side, and over the
single roller on the other side. Screwing it back together,etc.
A guy did this on youtube, although in his case it was because
of actually broken tape, needing spliced, you can just ignore
that part I guess cuz it still shows the case opening stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1PJWA2KGyg
And in fact there are other youtube videos in the "related"
thing along the side that show other examples by other
posters, so watching a couple of these clips should make
you confident enough.
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| rjisinspired |
| Posted: Feb 6 2012, 06:40 AM |
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Advanced Member
Group: Members
Posts: 1256
Member No.: 20008
Joined: 12-October 06
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Thanks Mayhem.
I forgot to mention that I use to do this with audio tape shells, a very long time ago. Kind of tricky to do since those tapes don't have flange reels to hold the tape in place. Should be a no-brainer for VHS. It seems easier because of that. So I was curious if there was anything else that might trip me up, now I know. Watch something pop out at me, lol.
I have to confess that I am still analog at heart. I don't shoot VHS but I still cap it from time-to-time. This time around it is for a friend. Once in a great while I will shoot with Digital8 but something is wrong with the camera because I get a fuzziness of the image, don't know why. I didn't at one time and then it just started.
And yes I do some times still use audio cassettes for recording.  |
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