Advice for tape drive repair / maintenance

[Tony Duell]

> What people want and expect out of equipment has changed.  If it hadn't, 
> we'd all still be driving around in Morris Minors.  That's actually a 

I wish I was!

> good example - it's impossible to achieve modern emissions figures from 
> a car engine fitted with a carburettor, and there is a lot to go wrong 
> in one.  Fuel injection systems keep better track of mixture giving 

You know, it all my years of car repair (although I don't drive, I've 
repaired my father's cars for 30 years or so), I've only ever had to do 
2 carburetter repairs. A needle valve that stuck closed, and a torn 
diaphragm in a Znetih CDS. 

> cleaner emissions and better economy, and there's less to go wrong.  If 
> anything does go wrong, it will tell you what's upset it.

And now he has this Skoda with an electronic controller for the 
igntiion/injhection and another one for the transmission. Sure I can read 
out the fault codes and follow the procedures in the workshop manual if 
it goes wrong. But if it fails '7 miles from nowherr and beyond' I think 
I would have a much better chance of fixing a carburetter than this 
system. (as indeed I once did to a friend's Land Rover. Seriously, the 
police called me to say this chap had broken down and he felt I was the 
one person who could get it going again. I did. A bit of insulating tape 
to patch up the torn diaphragm in the carbutetter got him going again and 
got him home. Next day he fitted a new diaphragm.

> 
> Look at household appliances, too - how much do you think it costs to 
> make that big cam switch inside a washing machine?  It's much cheaper to 
> replace all that with a PIC microcontroller (most common MCU I've seen 
> in washing machines) and a few triacs, maybe a relay or two. 
> Furthermore, if it turns out that there's a problem (Hey, the half-hour 
> wash cycle doesn't rinse properly!) it's easy to fix.

Eh? I've rebuilt those cam-timer programmers. And I could do it again. 
Much more quickly than having to reapir something based on a PIC with no 
source code or even object code available.

-tony