stepleton
Veteran Member
I have two Tektronix 4051s, and neither has DC200 tape cartridge drives in perfect health.
On the first, the drive sounds like it's been built out of flagpole pulleys and pepper grinders. I assume I can service the transport motor etc. with some porpoise jaw oil (or some sewing machine oil if I can't find any of that). It reads and writes tapes successfully.
The second sounds better but is in a worse condition. When I first tried it, an attempt to get a tape directory listing (via TLIST) would list the first record on the tape and then a tape error. This is a bad result but not terrible: at least a lot of the components needed to read the tape are working. I thought it might be the case that the head had wandered slightly out of alignment, so why not give the adjustment screws a little tweak and see what happens...
Well, what happens is that TLIST now fails to do anything useful: either it'll give you a tape error or it'll roll the tape a bit, stop it, then hang the machine until you eject the tape (and then it's a tape error). Silly me.
Tek's published procedure for getting a tape drive back into service requires a special "calibration tape" and an accompanying tuning procedure for you and your oscilloscope. These tapes have probably all been destroyed. Has anyone managed to adjust a Tektronix tape drive into working without a calibration tape? I can use other Tek 405x machines here to create tapes containing data, for what that's worth.
On the first, the drive sounds like it's been built out of flagpole pulleys and pepper grinders. I assume I can service the transport motor etc. with some porpoise jaw oil (or some sewing machine oil if I can't find any of that). It reads and writes tapes successfully.
The second sounds better but is in a worse condition. When I first tried it, an attempt to get a tape directory listing (via TLIST) would list the first record on the tape and then a tape error. This is a bad result but not terrible: at least a lot of the components needed to read the tape are working. I thought it might be the case that the head had wandered slightly out of alignment, so why not give the adjustment screws a little tweak and see what happens...
Well, what happens is that TLIST now fails to do anything useful: either it'll give you a tape error or it'll roll the tape a bit, stop it, then hang the machine until you eject the tape (and then it's a tape error). Silly me.
Tek's published procedure for getting a tape drive back into service requires a special "calibration tape" and an accompanying tuning procedure for you and your oscilloscope. These tapes have probably all been destroyed. Has anyone managed to adjust a Tektronix tape drive into working without a calibration tape? I can use other Tek 405x machines here to create tapes containing data, for what that's worth.
