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RE: What the heck?

Posted by ironbut (A) on June 13, 2014 at 12:30:28

In Reply to: What the heck? posted by DRam on June 11, 2014 at 18:38:36:

Take a look at the unplayed tapes.
Mold usually appears as a whitish dusting on the sides of the tape through the windage holes (holes in the flanges).
If you remove one of the flanges, you should be able to make out the shape of the windage holes on the side of the tape pack.
If it is mold and you collect tapes that are important, you're in for a mini ordeal.
The following is a taste of what would be done at a tape archive.

First, you should use a respirator when dealing with this and all procedures should be done either outside or in a room that can be decontaminated.
Get the machine that played the tapes away from your other tapes. You might imagine it as a fountain of spores until it's been cleaned.
Cleaning should be done with hydrogen peroxide on hard surfaces and multiple vacuuming of the room you played the tape in should be done.
Dump all the tape and boxes. You can clean the reels with peroxide.
Cleaning the machine should be done with a vacuum several times then the peroxide. Partial disassembly might be called for depending on the amount of contamination.

Obviously this is pretty extreme but if you have a collection that is important, it isn't.
These spores are dangerous to people (in large amounts) and will spread the mold to other tapes.

BTW, it is possible that it's something other than mold.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

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