Fairlight-CMI

Steven, Tony,

quick update: just saw the offer on ebay. Well, the one that came with mine was 8mm Exabyte (?) already, so I don't know if you could just as well drop in a DDS drive for an older Archive drive. These were among the first tape streamers I had encountered in PC land, and I'm not perfectly sure any more whether they had completely standard SCSI interfaces in the beginning.

Anyway, maybe much more important: If it's the same technology as I saw before, then a rubber wheel actually drives the tape (or, half the tape, and half a metal wheel inside the cartridge).

A decade ago or so :-) I revived one of these old streamers of mine to read some even older tapes. It seemed to work, but not for long - because that rubber wheel quickly turned itself to sticky jelly. It's outer surface might have looked unremarkable, and I wouldn't have noticed the problem beforehand.

Before you do the same, you might want to check the consistency of that wheel, to avoid damage to your tapes. I finally replaced mine by some plumbing or similar rubber part, which had the same size, and worked...

Kind regards, Joerg

--- In Fairlight-CMI@yahoogroups.com, "linear226.excite" <linear226@...> wrote:
> [...]
> http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261023776356?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649
> 
> cheers Tony
> [...]
> 
> I'm definitely interested in at least the tape streamer. Do you have a link to the items?
> 
> - Stephen