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I've seen posts on here about sticky-shed, and about avoiding it through drying tapes carefully.So, I'm in the basement, getting a box of reel to reel tapes, and to get to it, I have to move this @$%&ing food drier my wife insisted we needed at some point in time, and I notice the nice flat racks in the drier...and I look at the thickness of a reel...and compare it to the spacing of the racks...
So my question is, would a sort of convective drying be effective means of trying to avoid the dread shed, and if so, would a food drier work for this? I know they don't get real hot...and it's just the right size..
Also, on the subject of shed, is it always a risk? Is it a 'better safe than sorry' precaution to do some kind of drying for tapes that have been in slightly humid environments (my basement is somewhat cellar-like in that regard...not moist or even damp but a little more humid than the upstairs).
tia,
Follow Ups:
The food dehydrator is a good way to dry out the tapes, and it's a lot easier than building your own oven, which is what I did. The one very important caution is that you'll want to be sure that it doesn't have any stray magnetic fields which can partially erase the tape with their exposure to it for several hours.I recommend 125-135 degrees F, and I set mine to 130. This gets the job done a little faster than 115-120, and still isn't hot enough to case damage. For 1/4" tapes, I bake for 4 hours.
You will have anywhere from a couple weeks to maybe a month to transfer the audio to new media before it will begin to shed again. I copy everything to computer hard drive, and then make CDs of the resulting .WAV files, as well as making audio CDs.
The link mentioned by larryboy is a good one, and is one source I used when planning my oven. Here's a link to my page regarding sticky shed. It contains a couple of other angles not covered by the other link.
HTH
I will be adding it to my Reel to Reel page on my website.
"Music is love"
Teresa
Food driers are an excellent way to treat tapes for "sticky shed". Here's a link with all the information you need.
Baking tapes is way to play them again...for a while...without having the gummy shedding. Certainly storing tapes in a damp place is not a good idea ("cool, dry place") but I don't know that its necessarily will produce sticky tape, which is more to do with the particular formulation of the tape, i.e. some brands/periods are worse than others.Convection ovens are ideal, IF they evenly maintain the right temperature. Get yourself one of those pastry thermometers that measure temps in that range and test the oven, leave it on for a day. You want it tostay in the range of 115-125 F. If it can:
Bake the tapes at that temp for 8 to 10 hours.
Allow to cool for 24 hours.
DON'T Preheat the oven. All tapes should be at room temperature, and placed in the oven when it's "cold".
Don't overpack the oven. Put spacers between so air can circulate.After baking, you'll have about 30 days of trouble-free use of the tape. After that the shedding may begin again. Bake as many times as you need, the tape and the reel aren't damaged at these relatively low temperatures.
As one who has baked about 750 tapes (virtually all gray-box Ampex 406, some Ampex 456), I can tell you the following. First, use a convection oven (I use an old Farberware). Second, bake at 130 degrees for 6 hours. I actually use an Intermatic light timer for this purpose. In the Farberware you can bake up to six reels at once, if you use reel spacers between them. Keep a candy thermometer inside the oven to measure the temperature. Once you've got the temperature set, you won't have to play with it again--although the temperature in the oven will vary about five degrees in either direction as it it is baking. Third, copy the tapes to fresh media as soon as you can. I recall that Ampex actually obtained a patent on the technique of baking tapes which suffered from SSS, and it's my recollection that the patent stated that at 130 degrees the high frequencies would not be erased-and that has been my experience. However, a number of years ago I was told by an Quantegy engineer that the tape binder will continue to deteriorate over time to the point where even baking won't help. Finally, if you can, avoid fast-winding the tapes. All of the tapes which I baked were recorded "tails out". Using an Otari MX5050-BII as the source deck, after baking I was able to thread the tape directly from the takeup reel to the supply reel and wind the tape off to the supply reel that way, so that the only time the tape passed through the machine was when it was played. I found that if I did this and immediately copied the tape, the baked tape left absolutely no residue on the Otari, and played perfectly. If you can't do this and your deck has the ability to slow down the rewinding process (e.g., a "library" mode), use it.
I do not recommend anyone using baking as a final solution to their sticky shed woes. Should you be so unfortunate as to have tapes with SSS, if you can rescue them, dub them onto fresh tape, CD, or whatever IMMEDIATELY.
Every time you bake a tape or let it shed/squeal, you lose some of the programming. And it's gone forever. It may be just a few of the higher cycles in the frequency range and may not be noticeable at first. But the damage is very real. The binder, base, and coating are already terminally ill if they do have SSS. Baking them, as mentioned above, is only a *SHORT TERM FIX* meant for rescuing an otherwise irreplacable recording.A person who tries to shortcut and do things on the cheap by thinking he doesn't need to buy new tape or do a dub; that he can get by simply by baking them over and over is going to deserve every bit of 'kicking-himself-in-the-butt' frustration he will eventually get when even baking will no longer save the tapes.
It's no different than getting a nail in your car tire. Sure you can patch it and make it drivable again. But you can only do that so many times before you WILL NEED to replace it. And I doubt that any amount of patching can rescue a tire that's been driven over a spike strip, which is often the condition of tapes that have advanced SSS.
I was a pastry chef and baker for 20 years, and never once in those 20 years did I ever come across a "pastry thermometer". Do you mean perhaps an oven thermometer, meat thermometer, deep fry thermometer, or candy thermometer? I imagine any of those would work well, as they are typically calibrated in the proper temperature range and are reasonably accurate.
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