[HECnet] TK50 issues

I guess you meant iso-propanol, right? YES!! Thank you for correcting the spelling mistake. Just in case someone runs to the chemist for a pint of the aldehyde, which is a lot more toxic than the alcohol. Verzonden vanaf mijn BlackBerry 10-smartphone. Van: Jerome H. Fine Verzonden: woensdag 14 mei 2014 03:19 Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] TK50 issues Evening all, Got a nice haul of equipment today...aside from the TK50 issues and the smoking VT340 everything seems to be okay! However: CARTRIDGE PRESENT HEAD AT TRACK ZERO POSITIONED AT BOT TRK NUMBER 00 LOGICAL TRACK NUMBER = 0. PHYSICAL BLK# 0000 PHYSICAL BLOCK NUMBER = 0. LOGICAL BLK# 00 LOGICAL BLOCK NUMBER = 0. TAPE POSITION 000EFB TAPE POSITION = 3835. DRIVE STATE 035E RD/WRT STATE 1937 OPERATION FLGS 0201 CNTRLR STATUS 0C DRIVE ERROR DRIVE ERR CODE 93 AMPLITUDE ON HEAD 2 TOO LOW and an error about it being unable to find calibration track 2 on the second drive lead me to believe the drives may be faulty. The leader isn't broken and I've reattached it to the arm on the one where it had come off. How would I do about cleaning one? Are the drives bad and a cleaning wouldn't help? (Yes, I tried multiple cartridges) Over 95% of the time I had a "bad" TK50, it was because the heads required cleaning. After sitting around for more than a decade, the TK50 tapes no longer leave the heads very clean. Cleaning the TK50 head is quite easy once the drive has been removed from a drive bay and the 3 bolts holding down the cover have been removed. A smaller screw driver can then remove the bolt holding the piece in front of the head. I use Q-tips and isoproponal. The whole procedure takes less than 5 minutes. No alignment is required if just the piece in front of the head is removed since it blots back into exactly the same position. Probably the rollers should also be cleaned as well. I usually had to clean the heads every time the equivalent of a complete TK50 tape was used. If the TK50 drive is going to be used frequently, it is best to leave the drive out of the drive bay. with the cover off. However, be sure to keep the same power source from the backplane. While a hard disk drive seems to accept a PC power supply as the power source, the TK50 seems to require the same power source as the backplane which is used to power the CPU and other boards. If necessary, use an extension for the 5v / 12v plug that the TK50 requires. The normal 20 pin (??) cable for signals to the controller board is usually long enough to stretch to some other convenient location outside the drive bay. Jerome Fine