Hi, a few weeks ago, I made a DIY cassette rewinder and presented it here: https://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/diy-simplified-nagakoa-ct-406-hand-winder-3d-print.10207/ (Would be better in the Cassettes section and not in the Boombox & Ghettoblaster section). After all I can use the rewinder. Many of my prerecorded cassettes do no more play accurately; mostly due to degraded tape material . So I asked the company in Germany that assembles the cassettes for the 3 ??? (in German: Die Drei ???) and many more famous series for a roll of raw material. They were kind enough to sell me a roll of 3'800 m of Type I tape for a very fair price. I used the 3D printer to construct a small tool. The printer is limited to 256 x 256 mm, so it was necessary to split it in different parts. The colours are random because I used leftover filament. The counter is used to match the length of the tape to the play time of the tracks on the A/B side. The pinch roller comes from an entire drive mechanism that I bought in China for a ridiculously low price (about 3 EUR for the whole unit including playback/recording head, motor and belt -see picture). The drive looks suspiciously similar to that one used in a model that was new introduced some years ago. I hope the similarity is only in the way it looks and not in the quality…). This little tool allows to rewind new blank tape material on pre-record cassettes and then re-record the content without having to sacrifice blank cassettes just for the tape material. 3.8 km of tape will last for a while I prefer a cassette that is not 100% original rather than a 100% original that is bad in sound or even no longer playable. If anyone is interested in the .stl or Fusion files, let me know. Btw: I am still looking for tape material to splice the tape. Does anyone have a source or a recommendation for this? -thank you
These kind of projects are a lot of fun, I used to have to make jigs to hold cassettes for different secondary operations. I don't know what the splice tape is, 3M probably still makes some version of it but there are sellers on Ebay with bulk rolls. I moved the other thread, to the Walkman Section.
It's funny I just bought a splicing kit a few days ago, it arrived yesterday. I have a few cassettes that the tape have come away from the leader, I wanted to try and fix them. Not had a chance to use the splicer yet, I guess I will try over the weekend. Here is what I bought tape splicer
