On 2015-Oct-07, at 12:56 PM, Glen Slick wrote: > On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilp...@cs.ubc.ca> wrote: >> >> I have an HP 7970A - 9-track, 800BPI - with my HP 2116. I wrote monitor >> commands to exercise it and do tape dumps from it. >> >> They're uncommon compared to 1600 & > BPI drives, figured that was because >> the 800 standard was older and saw a shorter life before being superseded, >> but are such drives that rare or hard to come by? >> >> (I rather wished it was 1600 so I could read more-common tapes.) > > I have an 800BPI 7970B in a 2113B rack system. I've never gotten > around to trying to get it up and running. Are they fairly reliable > drives to get going again? I don't have any other 800BPI drives to > write any tapes to read with it.
Well, the unit here was in pretty good physical condition as received. It had a cascading failure in the capstan driver but it was a fairly straightforward fix. I think there was one sluggish/partially-seized pulley bearing (freed up with some oil). Pretty rugged drives as you know. I wonder about the capstan rubber in the long term but I think that's about the only thing to worry about on age alone. I think bitsavers nowadays has manuals and schematics for the B version as you have, years ago I had to do some reverse-engineering for the capstan repair. This page is over ten years old and needs some updating, but FWIW: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/HP21xx/HP2116CSys/index.html Note the tape drive repair log page linked there.