John Nemeth writes:
 > Don't take pokes at mechanism from the front.  You can't see what
 > you're doing, so may jab something harder then you should.

I must agree.  I once boneheadedly tried to clean a DAT drive with a
Q-Tip(tm) and high-proof isopropanol.  I managed to get one of the
cotton fibers caught around one of the tiny read-write heads on the
tilted-axis spinning head unit.  This was enough to misalign the head
just slightly, but enough that it never read from or wrote to a tape
properly again.  (Of course, attempts to realign the head made it
worse, until it eventually broke.)  I had to send the drive back to HP
for repair.  :(

Never again will I try that trick.

- Geoff