At 9:40 -0400 15/6/05, Christina Hostetter wrote:
>I hope that someone might have a solution for this problem. This
>morning I am having my intern copy oral history tapes to make service
>copies for research and to send off for transcription and while she was
>dubbing one of the tapes in the high speed dubbing machine it stopped.
>At that point the copy rewound but the original wouldn't budge. I
>pulled it out of the machine and tried to manually advance or reverse
>the tape but it is completely stuck as if all of the tape melted
>together at that one spot. The tape will rewind but it will not go past
>that one spot so half of the tape is usable and the other half is just
>stuck. Any suggestions on how to salvage this tape? Is it salvageable?

I recently had a problem like that and I discovered, on opening the
cassette case, that the tape was looped around the source core as a
single circuit (that is, there were two joins and so the tape could
not unwind). I solved it by cutting and splicing. As it happens, mine
was at the leader, so I lost no content. You might want to open up
the case (have a spare on hand, if needed) and look at the tape where
it is stuck.

Barbara Need
Manager (SS4)