>Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
On 04/30/2017 07:38 AM, Mike Loewen via cctalk wrote:
Looking for recommendations for a bulk tape eraser for SDLT and DLT
IV tapes.
If it's just a small quantity to be erased, there are many Radio Shack
videotape erasers being offered, some NIB, all for about $20. I've used
one for years on floppies and tapes. It's not for erasing piles of
tapes, as there's a thermal overload protector on it, limiting the
amount of time that you can use it.
--Chuck
I don't know if my experience with tapes for the TK50 / TK70 applies,
but for
what it is worth, here is what was the problem. When a tape has been
written
by a TK50 drive, the TK70 drive will no longer be able to write on the tape
until the tape have been BULK erased. Since I had a number of tapes written
by a TK50 and I wanted to use the tapes for producing backups using a TK70,
I obviously needed to be able to BULK erase those tapes.
FORTUNATELY, I had an old voice coil fram a speaker available. It must have
been a large speaker because the coil was a cylinder about 3" in
diameter and about
3" long. The permanent magnet seems to have a few pounds of pull on any
iron
object, so I thought it might be useful. It probably takes about 30
seconds of slowly
rotating the voice coil over the surface of the TK50 / TK70 tape to
sufficiently
BULK erase the tape such that the TK70 drive would write on the tape.
Since I
believe that the TK50 / TK70 tapes are early DLT tapes, this method may also
be successful, if a bit slow, for a small quantity of tapes.
Jerome Fine
