On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Roger Ivie wrote:
> Anyone know an easy way to get the tongue back into 
> a TK50 cartridge?
I have had the best luck taking the cartridge apart. there is a brake as
well as the hub thingus (an obscure technical term).

> As soon as I copied the miniroot to the disk, the TK70 spit the tape out 
> (in the middle of writing the miniroot to the disk, I hear "BeepBeep!" and 
> the green light's on). Now it will not accept a tape; when I stick a tape
> in, it spools it around for a while and spits it back out. So I have a
> nicely labelled disk with the miniroot in the swap partition, but I can't
> boot it because my tape drive is misbehaving. 
> 
> Has anyone seen a TK70 do this before? Could it be simply demanding a 
> cleaning cartridge (which, of course, I don't have)?

My tk50's want their heads cleaned about every 2 or three tapes. Cleaning
the heads seems to make this problem go away. I am running tapes of
unknown heritage as are the drives though. If you remove the metal cage
over the takeup reel, you can get to the head pretty easily. I use "tape
head cleaning pads" which look like alcohol saturated hand cleaning
towels. a soft rag with alcohol would probably work fine.
 
Bob Harbour
bharbour@teleport.com