Bad or Broken Tape
 

I've done several searches, but can't find anything about a tape that has broken or one bad. I have a situation where I bought a tape rewinder. The second time I used it, it broke both the tape and the casette. Can anybody recommend to me a place where I can go to recovery the tape or the information off of the tape?

Thanks,

Phil

Philip, I'm also looking for a way to repair a broken tape and will let you know if I find anything. Have you found any leads since your post in October?

I've been editing a short documentary about my 15 year-old stepdaughter meeting her biological father for the first time. I was half way through capturing the source material when the tape broke. Needless to say, I want to try salvage the tape for a lot of reasons.

Does anyone out there have any adivce for fixing a broken tape?

Most cassettes have a little hole or button you can push with a pencil or something pointed to release the tension and open the door. Then you can pull a foot or two of the tape out. Lay it down, shiny side up, on a table and tape it down with Scotch tape a few inches to either side of the crinkled up part. Get a razor blade and cut out the bad part. Then overlap the two pieces an inch or so and make a single cut. That will give you clean ends that you can butt up together and splice. Use Scotch "invisible" tape to tape the two butted ends together. Again, put the splice on the back side (shiny side). Then rewind everything gently into the cassette, rewind the tape and as soon as you can, dub it via firewire to a new tape. I've done tape splices that last for several passes, but only in a deck. It's probably not a good idea to play it more than once in a camera. You'll lose a few seconds of a shot, but will save the tape. You can also buy tape splicing kits if you feel the need, but it's easy to do it as described above.

I sent my tape to "www.avrs.net". They were relatively close to Pennsylvania. They charged me $80.00. They returned my bad tape and a copy of the bad tape. It seemed to work out fine. The entire process took about a week.