The problem with saxon tape maintenance from HolyRollertv on Vimeo.

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The Problem With Saxon Tape Maintenance!
Before the mp3 was the cassette tape, your cassette tape was a Saxon tape, your Saxon tape was gold dust, your Saxon tape was the source of all Saxon tapes in your area. If there was a twist in the tape, or a drop in the tape where you recorded over by accident, then that was the version everyone owned. Preserving your Saxon tape is everything (in hindsight)!

Not many of the original Saxon tapes have survived up to this day! why? Because of The problem with Saxon tape maintenance! This fictitous trouble shooter menu for Saxon tape maintainance would have come in handy back in the day.

Level 1 tape catastrophe: Tape chewed

Constant rewinding of the same section over and over again, (almost all Saxon tape owners neglected torewind their precious tapes ! ) trying to learn that fast style lyric, leads to the inevitable, tape slacking resulting in the dreaded tape chew. Tape chew is a minor catastropie, your Saxon tape is chewed up in the tape mechanism,

Sometimes if your lucky its perfectly wrapped around the rubber rollers in the player mechanism. All you do is slowly release the tape from the rubber rollers, then roll the tape back onto the reel with a pencil WITH CLEAN HANDS. Most of the time the tape gets that squashed concertina effect, which makes it more difficult to roll back on to the reels. Usually this is quite straight forward to fix, Providing the tape doesnt snap whilst trying to remove it from the mechanism (see level 2).

A lot of the time, trying to remove your chewed Saxon tape from the cassette mechanism results in a tape snap. This usually means crude edits by way of a primitive splicing style using Sticky tape, nail varnish or any adhesive agent that won’t damage the tape, you will also need your mum’s small scissors. What follows is the long tedious process of getting the two bits of tape to sit evenly while you perform surgery on them, its a skillful process which requires full usage of hands ,teeth, chins and patience.

I.Too sparing on the sticky tape will result in the cassette tape coming apart inside casing,

II. Use too much sticky tape and Saxon tape won’t roll properly again.

III.As a precautionary measure, you will have to pretty much know where the splice is every time you play the refurbished Saxon tape … so you can fast forward past the edit point .

Level 3 tape catastrophe: Tape snap inside cassette casing

Saxon tape owners nightmare! The tape, usually one  that was previously spliced comes apart inside the cassette shell or casing. This is the one you dont want to happen. The job of fixing the snap requires some patience .

First of all, one has to separate the two halves of the casing, which means removal of the microscopic phillips head screws,  Keep screws together as they usually fall in the carpet, which then requires a radio telescope to locate. If you’re lucky its a clean break, I say lucky but opening a tape isn’t a job for the faint of heart. Locating the tape break and sticking back together sounds simple enough, BUT the main tape will almost cirtainly keep falling off  the spools creating masses of curly wurly spirals. You will constantly have to keep winding them back on, which is a separate problem in itself. This is a very dangerous precedure which can lead to a Level 4 and 5 tape catastrophe. Many will have the experience of splicing the two severed ends of tape outside the actual tape casing, without doubt they will try to thread fixed tape back round the cassette mechanism. Putting the cassette shell back together with all inner tape casing parts intact and in place is a labourious task that takes nerves of steel and long fuse !

DANGER!! Level 4 tape catastrophe: Tape reversal!

The tape reversal is the most common and most catastropic of all,which 95 % of the time leads to a level five or THE UNSPEAKABlE!! binning!

Tape reversal describes how a  tape manages to play the opposite side of the magnetic surface, causing the Saxon tape to play backwards! This happens for various reasons. Accidently twisting the tape while HAND WINDING the tape back on to spools during a Level 3 is the most common. Your Saxon tape is in danger of being well and truly stuffed here, and requires skills of  the Bourne Supremacy to sucesfully repair.

Fixing this tape is 50/50, you have to try to remember where you started rolling the tape back onto the reels, that’s probably where the twist was… Usually this can be done by fast forwarding or rewinding to the spot. If this doesn’t work and you most likely have to open the cassette shell again,
“which I didnt want to do sucker!”. You are now reaching analog critical mass !! BEWARE the cataclysmic Level 5 tape catastrophe!!

Level 5 tape catastrophe!: Tape spaghetti, tape off spools inside casing.

There comes a time when a Saxon tape must pass from this life to the next! This usually happens to your favorite  Saxon vs Young Lion session, you can pretty much guarantee that the problem is that you used  a super long but impracticle TDK 120 min  expensive metal tape,  far too much tape on the spools  to withstand the brutalization of constant rewinding and fast forwarding of your classic Saxon session.

Inevitably, the tape has become entangled inside the tape casing, and/or spun around the plastic wheels on the  far left or far right top inside of the doomed tape. This is serious and means that yet again one must open the battered casing, usually by now is held together with adhesive tape. Once the tape case is open, you can be sure that this will result in tape spaghetti meaning a mass of tangled unwindable  tape on your bedroom floor, one in a thousand tapes survive this process, your Saxon tape is not one of them!

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