At what temperature are you baking?
Steve Smolian
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Donahue
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 8:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] More tales of woe from the tape vaults
This has been my observation as well. I normally bake 2" tape on a 7 day
cycle. 4-5 days baking, 2-3 days resting. There has not been a tape that
could not be played to date. I've had some damage to the outside track, but
that is usually due to outside contaminants, not binder issues.
I've also noticed a steady increase in bake times. Clearly this a
progressive problem and these tapes will continue to deteriorate and
require more heroic efforts to transfer in the future. I tell everybody
with archives that these should be actively transferred now. It will only
get harder in the future.
As always, YMMV.
All the best,
Mark Donahue
On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 7:34 PM, John Chester <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 100 days to achieve moisture equilibrium? That must not be required for
> curing sticky-shed audio tapes, because they don't need to be baked
> anywhere near that long. I recently asked Steve Puntolillo (who regularly
> bakes 2" audio tape) how long he baked it. He said he gets clean playback
> on most 2" sticky-shed tapes after baking for 2 days, and cooling and
> resting for 1 day. My recent experience with 1/4" Ampex 407 is that one
> day bake and one day cool and rest is almost always adequate. However,
> both Steve and I have observed that the required bake time has about
> doubled compared to a few years ago.
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