Otari MX5050 mkiii tape lifters/guides

[thehammondman]

Hi all, I've recently acquired an Otari MX5050 mkiii (8 track), and it came with a fairly new ATR Master Tape. Everything seems to be working fine, but the tape does shed a bit, which requires me to clean the heads very frequently. I've ordered a new ATR Master Tape, but also noticed some slight wear on the tape lifters and guides, and wonder if this might be affecting the tape during rewind/fast forward mode. I've read elsewhere that unevenness in the lifters/guides can cause the tape to shed.

Any thoughts/experience with this? It doesn't look like you can rotate the lifters or guides but maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe it's just the tape shedding.

In any case, I'm wondering if it's possible to simply rotate the lifters/guides by 180 degrees to give a perfectly smooth surface for the tape to pass over.

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks, everyone.

 

[sweetbeats]

If the wear path was established by Ampex/Quantegy tape, the ATR tape may be slightly wider causing edge shed in your wear path. This is a known issue with Ampex/Quantegy tape. The tape slitting equipment they used could not slit the tape to as tight a tolerance as other brands, so in order to abate the risk of the tape being too wide, they slit the tape (IIRC) 0.001”-0.002” more narrow than spec, because the slitters produced tape with a 0.001”-0.002” variance in width...something like that. So wear paths established by Ampex/Quantegy tape are slightly more narrow on average and when you load tape that was accurately slit to spec, you get edge shed. It should often improve with use, but it is a pain until it subsides after some passes. You may be able to improve things in the long run by running a reel in fast wind from end to end a couple times with the lifters defeated. This will expedite the stripping of the edge shed, but also provide some needed wear at the edges of your tape path. The correct solution to this issue is a relap.

Do your heads have edge slots cut in them? Maybe you could put up some pics of your tape path?

You might look for “lifter sleeves”, small diameter stainless tubing cut to slip over your lifters.

I don’t recommend rotating your guides unless you relap your headblock assembly (which, if the slitting issue I’m talking about is the cause of your issue, is the *only* proper solution outside of reverting to using Ampex/Quantegy stock)...if you rotate your guides to a fresh surface but the heads remain in their current state, you will upset the wear path across the entire tape path and you will potentially disturb the wrap angle and tape-to-head contact that is currently established. This will impact your ability to calibrate the machine to spec and also inflict compound uneven wear patterns reducing head life. You don’t rotate or replace guides until you are also incorporating a fresh surface on the heads with a relap or new heads in conjunction with a proper setup by JRF or an equivalent service provider.

Hope this helps...sorry it’s a bit doom and gloom.