TK50 tribulations

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- On Tue, 6/2/09, Steve Maddison <steve at cosam.org> wrote:

> I recently dug out a TK50 I was tinkering with before and
> am having
> some trouble diagnosing what's up with it. It arrived with
> a tape
> stuck in it, but I've since managed to persuade that out
> and a good
> clean up had it loading and ejecting properly. Now any read
> or write
> just results in a bit of shoeshining, whereafter it goes
> into its
> light-show routine. Yes, I should probably just admit
> defeat and keep
> it for parts, but it seems so close to working I thought
> I'd take
> another stab.

Did you clean the heads AND the leader strip? I had one with so much fuzz on it that it would have surely gunked up the heads straight away. You can clean the leader with alcohol, just like the heads. Sometimes these things need multiple cleanings...

I assume you've got this connected to a PDP-11 or Vax that you're using to write to it, and that this isn't the SCSI flavored TK50Z. I ran into a similar problem with a TK50Z on a linux box - constant shoeshining. Turns out that I had to set the buffer in mt. After that, it worked just fine.

-Ian