WD40 on SSS and/or LOL non-backcoated tape? Really?

Blue Jinn

Blue Jinn

Rider of the ARPocalypse
OK,

There's a lot of folks over there (Tapeheads.net) that put car polish on sticky tape to unstickify it. :eek: Someone else has tried WD40 for the same thing, not only for SSS tapes, but for older non-backcoated tapes. I'm not about to put car polish or whatever the hell is WD40 (which for everything where metal meets metal that stuff is PFM) any where near a tape deck, but has anyone ever even heard of that? WTH?
 
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The guys at Tapeheads sniff the car polish and WD40...... :p

Love to know how they keep that shit off the rubber and the capstan after they smear it all over the tape?
Not to mention....WTF is the point?
I mean, you got sticky tape with music on it....OK...bake the damn thing, transfer to another tape or DAW or whatever, and toss the SSS tape out.
It's a lot easier, and certainly less messier than smearing car polish and WD40 all over the tape.
I don't get the obsession some of those guys have with trying to use/reuse shitty tape...???...and, most of them aren't even doing any serious recording. It's more about guys who want to playback prerecorded 30 year old tapes they found on eBay for cheap....and then they spend all this time with silly concoctions trying to make it work.
Just a lot of consumer grade stuff...trying to come of as "audiophile". :D
 
Nothing much there that you could/would run home to try on your SSS tapes.

She does a continuous drip/wash of isopropyl alcohol on the tape while it plays.
OK....that would certainly prevent the stickiness from taking hold of the guides with all that isopropyl slathered all over it....but man, look at what she had to do to the tape deck to rig all that up (now go do the same to 1/2", 1" and 2" decks). In the end, it doesn't really solve the SSS problem, it just temporarily "washes" the tape while it plays, and she has to "wash" the tape EVERY time she plays it. The caution/consideration is that using that much isopropyl on the tape could actually cause more chemical breakdown of the tape with multiple applications.

I wonder how many tapes she's used that technique on as a regular working process, and not so much in an experimental prototype rig...?

Anyway... that's not going to work for anyone else in a real world application.
I can see in her line of work as an archivist, when she's trying to salvage some critical/historical tape...and nothing else solves the SSS....but it's certainly not for the typical recording studio or home rec guys.
Well...maybe over at Tapeheads...just drop the deck into a kitchen sink and you're ready to go! :D
 
What I do for "mild" sticky tapes...like when they've been in poor environments, but the tape itself isn't the typical SSS kind....is to wrap some lint-free paper wipes (meant for critical cleaning applications) around a pencil.
I then hold the pencil/paper against the tape as it FW/RW applying mild pressure, but not disrupting the tape transportation.
It's a bit tricky at first, but once you get the hang of it, knowing where to apply the pencil/paper and how to hold the it so as not to have it go flying away on you, or causing the tape to jerk/jump and ending up with a mess...it works quite well.

With several winds of paper on the pencil, with each pass, I spin the pencil until I have no more clean paper, then I rip the off and continue. After 4-6 passes, the tape leaves less and less residue and becomes less and less sticky.
If cleaned up a lot of used reels this way, and once I've worked the tape a bunch of time....after that it runs smoother and smoother with each pass until there's no more stickiness and the heads/guides remain clean.

I got the idea from seeing a special rig on a 2" deck at a tape transfer house, where they had a couple of extra guides mounted, and on them was like a cotton cloth ribbon that they could clean/wind/clean/wind against the moving tape.
It was a much more slicker setup than my pencil approach...it was done to a spare deck that wasn't good for any REC/PB use...so it was just for cleaning tapes. I don't have a spare 2"....so I use the paper/pencil approach. :D
 
blue jinn said:
ok,

there's a lot of folks over there (tapeheads.net) that put car polish on sticky tape to unstickify it. :eek: Someone else has tried wd40 for the same thing, not only for sss tapes, but for older non-backcoated tapes. I'm not about to put car polish or whatever the hell is wd40 (which for everything where metal meets metal that stuff is pfm) any where near a tape deck, but has anyone ever even heard of that? Wth?
Click to expand...

Nooooooo!!!!!! :facepalm:

None of that voodoo works. I won't even bother with Tapeheads anymore or Gearslutz or Harmony Central or anyplace else. There's more bad advice and wrong-headed nonsense online now than I can keep up with. It's worse than ever. At one time we had it all right here in the Analog Forum, and it's still here if people search, but elsewhere it is just total mayhem. There's no fixing the misconceptions. I won't even try anymore... unless someone would put me on the payroll and give me something for my time.

Marie O'Connell's isopropyl wet play method is good however for tough cases with loss of lubricant, but it's tedious and beyond the means of most people. It does work though.
 
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