[QuadList] Deck degaussing--What's the current practice amongQuadList users?

[Bill Carpenter]

Hi Folks,

When two great engineers were developing the last great quad DOC, the second one for the AVR-3, a new non-destructive way to add magnetic dropouts or mag scratches was devised. 

Get a section of the rubber magnet material from a old refrigerator door gasket. It's what holds the door closed and causes the gasket to seal. The stuff I have seen and used was about a 1/4" wide and 1/8" thick and could be cut very easily with a sharp knife or a pair of diagonal cutters.
I would keep a piece about the length of a  toothpick (2.5"-3") shaped with a fine point, in my shirt pocket when I was doing a demo. You could make all kinds of dropouts with this and not damage the tape stock, just that recording. 

This is what happens when two great VTR engineers have to make a great digital DOC!

What you don't want is any of the rare earth super magnets anywhere around tape products. A un-named NY post house did dubbing on some quads in the basement level in the late 70's and a guy decided to store the razor blade they used to cut tape on one of the metal support columns with a rare earth magnet which just stuck to the Lally column. 

That caused so many problems, they finally removed the column and the guy who brought the magnet in to store the razor blade. Take care!
 

Bye for now, Bill Carpenter


________________________________
 From: Don Norwood <dwnorwood at embarqmail.com>
To: Quad List <quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2012 7:13 PM
Subject: Re: [QuadList] Deck degaussing--What's the current practice amongQuadList users?
 
Celebrating four years of Quad Conversations, July 25, 2012
______________________________________________



 
Hi Ted:
 
I degauss everything in the tape path on a fairly regular schedule.  
Why would you want to take a chance otherwise?  When you discover that you 
need to do it, it's too late.  Obviously, a problem could arise between 
scheduled degausing times, but that's not been a problem for me recently.  
 It's also my standard practice to degauss a new headwheel before mounting 
it on the machine.
 
Specifically regarding the headwheel, it is possible for a single head tip 
to become magnetized.  When that happens, you probably won't notice it on 
the first pass, but subsequent passes of the same tape will become very obvious 
with a loss of RF on the magnetized channel.  I haven't seen that 
problem in a long time, but I remember it well from the first time I saw it in 
the early 70's and didn't realize what was wrong! 
 
Don Norwood
Digitrak Communications, Inc.
www.digitrakcom.com  
----- Original Message ----- 
>From: Ted Langdell 
>Chris, 
>
>
>Sounds like you're saying that its better to invest the relatively short  amount of time to degauss the tape path often rather than to have  un-repairable damage to archive or customer tape's content that can't be  replaced or restored.
>
>
>What is the current practice among our QuadList users?
>
> 

______________________________________________
Please trim posts to relevant info when replying.

Change subject to reflect thread direction. Thanks.
_______________________________________________

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