My mold fix

Man, it sucked when I found out about mold - I put in a copy of Jackie Chan's Project A and the picture was terrible. When I checked the tape, it was the first time I'd ever seen mold on a cassette. I went through my entire collection (about 500 at the time) and pulled out 50 that were in varying stages, from a few spots to complete coverage.

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After reading some posts on Lunchmeat, I rigged up a little woodworking project, using a cheap thrift-store VCR. The ends of the dowels are wrapped in microfibre cloth, and make contact with both sides of the tape. I put on a mask, ventilate the room, put a little alcohol on each dowel, then fast forward the tape. Then I clean the dowels, re-apply the alcohol and rewind the tape. Sometimes if the mold is bad, I'll run it through two or three times.

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If the mold is heavy, I'll open the case and blow it out, swab it down with more alcohol. It can be tricky with some tapes - there's some old Vestron cassettes that have odd screws holding it together, so I'll usually just try to swab the spools through the holes in the top of the case.

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Then I put the tape into quarantine for a few months to make sure the growth is dead. Then it's back into the collection!

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I should mention that I don't play-test every tape, and sometimes the mold is so heavy that it does affect playback. But if it's a rare tape, most of the time I'm just happy to have it back in my collection that I'd rather keep it even if it doesn't play optimally. But it works! I saved a beloved copy of The Gate this way.

Anyone do anything like this?

https://i.redd.it/i6afa8nqjv421.jpg

https://i.redd.it/lkbkiqntjv421.jpg

https://i.redd.it/eu3778xrjv421.jpg

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