On 2012-06-08 09:12, Dave McGuire wrote: On 06/08/2012 03:09 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote: The most common problem with the TK50 is that the tape pickup gets off the holding arm. Easy to fix if you are comfortable with a screw driver. I've had one or two TK50 go bad in other ways, but in my experience it's pretty uncommon for them to really break. It's almost always that pickup. Let me know if you need help understanding that. The "tongue"? Been fixing that problem for years. At one point I ordered a box of (I think) ten of those while DEC was still selling them as repair parts, but they're all gone now. Eventually the little grabber end breaks off due to plastic fatigue. The drives whose tongues are intact simply refuse to read and cause device timeouts. I have at least 7 or 8 in that condition, with no obvious mechanical flaws. I haven't dug into them very deeply. Ok. The next obvious thing is just cleaning. As with all tape drives, the heads needs cleaning once in a while. Get isopropanol, some cotton heads, and just clean them. If things still fails after that, then I don't have any more quick fixes. :-) But next to the pickup, the cleaning have fixed countless of them for me. Johnny