[QuadList] fun questions for you hardware gurus

Sun Jan 27 11:56:30 CST 2013

Hi Bill, 

Yes Bev and Katy have been very kind to me over the past few years sharing some of his vast "head" knowledge with me at the TAMIS archive. He taught me how to rewind a quad head tip coil with a microscope and perform frequency response and impedance sweep measurements, and then afterward, gave me(TAMIS) the equipment he used at Ampex to do it with . 

    That helped out a lot. A t the time we had several defunct  Mark 10  heads with 2.5-2.8 mil tip projection,(a practically new head, but with an open head coil on each one. Not to mention the money it saved TAMIS by not having to pay out $3,400.00 to send a head out to be rebuilt. X 3 heads is over $10,000.00 Crazy money for a small regional archive. 

Bev was like,"no big deal" like something he used to do every day. 

Amazing. 

Bev and Katy moved back home to Knoxville, Tennessee  after he retired from Ampex, I think around 2001?? 

I met Bev sort of by happenstance. Actually he introduced himself to me. It was at the very first TAMIS archive public showing held in the East Tennessee History Center in 2006. We had collected and restored and digitized enough Knoxville-related footage for a good hour long show and had advertised in the papers. Part of the showing contained some 2 inch quad restoration work I had done on a 1967 Dolly Parton low band color tape, and Bev saw the "quad" reference and came out of curiosity to see what we were up to. 

    After the screening was over the crowd was milling around, and this fellow walks up to me and in his way of talking, you know,tells me how much he liked the quality of my quad work, and then goes into details for 10 more minutes, quizzing me how did you do this, did you rebuild that,et c,. 

He never once ever hinted knowing anything about video recording. 

Later , I was flabbergasted to learn I had been  talking to  one of the founding fathers of magnetic video recording. Good Grief!! 

But that was  Bev. M odest at all times. 

I was very honored and touched that he had thought enough about my quad restoration work  to take the time to tell me so and get involved with TAMIS and share some of his "head" knowledge with me. 

Larry Odham 

----- Original Message -----

Hi Larry, 

I met and worked with Bev the first day at Ampex in Elk Grove, Il and he was a great friend forever. He could explain anything happening in the head area very well. He had a hobby of collecting cameras. We got in to a discussion over lunch one day, and after that I watched for certain cameras at Flea Markets and Garage Sales for him. 
I had 3 Kodak Retina's, 2- 2a's and a 3a, and the push button on bottom fell out and I lost it. 
Bev rebuilt it, and took apart on of the 2's to get the part design. He made one at home, and when he brought all of them back working well, I asked whether he had any in his collection, when he said no, I gave him both of the 2a's. I also had a couple old movie cameras and a Minute 16 which I added to his collection. 
In the mid 90's a group came to Ampex, and threw money at them to allow them to try to futher develope a patent that Bev had at Ampex, for "Keeper'ed Media". A high permabilty layer is added to the disc and there was a method to read thru that layer. 

I had worked a lot with audio heads before Ampex, so it was great to work with Bev the  first day in the video business. He had designed the Alfasil video heads for the 1" helical format. 

Bye for now, love to all, Bill & Gewyn & Ginger (whoof...whoof) 

From: L.E. Odham <leodham at centurylink.net> 
To: Quad List <quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com> 
Sent: Sunday, January 27, 2013 6:44 AM 
Subject: Re: [QuadList] fun questions for you hardware gurus 

Hi Dave, 

Bev Gooch at Ampex probably played a major role in the development of instrumentation recorders and head assemblies. 

-More that he would ever take credit for.  

Bev was a principal scientist at Ampex. He went to work there in 1962. At the time, he held several patents for magnetic recording apparatus'. 

    I remember asking him one day what all the patent certificates hanging on his walls were for. He said that before he went to work for Ampex, the Brush corp bought several of his longitudinal video recording head patents. This would have been in 1958 or '59. Up until then, I suppose Ampex considered him as  a competitor in the video recording field. His longitudinal video patents were from 1953,-'54. 
   Brush planned to use the(his) video head design patents for instrument recorders.The rest he took with him to Ampex in '62. 

 He and Edward Schiller also shared a couple patents on magnetic head design. 

He mentioned to me once while visiting that he had contributed a little to the gap sputtering process used in the multichannel stacked-head designs Ampex came out with in the mid-60s. 

It may be that some of the Honeywell,etc.,and others, equipment that came later may have originated from the Brush patent collection thru lineage, chain of patent ownership, buyouts, licensing, etc. 

That could explain some of the similarities you noticed between different manufacturers since many of the fundamental design patents at that time can be traced back to one person. 

Larry Odham 

I owned a pair of FR-80's many years ago that were surplus from NASA in Huntsville. 
I remember being super impressed with the level of design perfection. 
They were 14-track 1" machines.  Found an old B&W print from my dusty archives... 
Never could figure out why 14 when the standard for 1" for the rest of us  
was 16 tracks, unless NASA for some reason spec'ed it that way. 

They had beautifully machined 10" brass capstan pulleys that used 
sewn silk or nylon belts, ran at 15, 30, or 60 ips, had swappable record and 
playback modules for regular or FM recording, some even had little 2" 
oscilliscopes for each channel!  They used compressed air feeding the 
guides, and a pressure sensor to each guide modulated the take-up 
or supply reel tension.  The capstan was in the middle, the tape wrapped 
around an idler with an optical tachometer, and when you started the 
tape in Reproduce or Record, the takeup would first pull the tape through 
the whole head assembly and get it moving at exactly the right speed 
before 

he pinch rollers would engage it to the spinning capstan. 
I was quite impressed with the transport. 

Of course this was for the space program, probably used to record many 
channels of telemetry of rocket engine tests or who knows what. 
I've since seen similar apparently compatible 14-track machines made by 
Honeywell and... Bell & Howell? 

My first exposure to the later quad-type machines like the FR-600 was 
the guys working to read the Apollo tapes. 

But I was always extremely impressed with Ampex's ability to turn out 
such quality instrumentation. 

It was interesting having two of them standing in my spare bedroom on 2x4's! 
They made flawless analog recordings...  
But no erase heads!!! 

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