Is there anybody within the community who has the equipment and expertise to repair a damaged miniDV camcorder tape. I'm sure you can appreciate my reluctance to get this done in a high street camera, etc shop! Please post here or contact me on pm to discuss shipping, recompense, etc. Thanks.
I used to repair and recover damaged VHS tapes all the time. This was a relatively simple task I used to do, via
- opening the cassette casing - cutting out the ripped or chewed up parts of the tape - re-attaching the cut parts of the tape using scotch tape
if the cassette casing or internal parts of cassette were damaged or broken, I would simply unscrew the cassette and remove the tape reels from the damaged cassette and move them into a new cassette casing. I would often cannibalize the parts from other cassette casings.
VHS tapes were easy to repair....but miniDV tapes are a whole lot harder because none of the miniDV tapes I had had screws where you could take the darn thing apart. All the miniDV tapes I had were riveted together so there was no way to take the thing apart without breaking the casing, and no way to put the casing back together unless you had a professional machine to do this.
I forgot to add, if it is only the beginning or a small part of the MiniDV tape that is chewed up, you can repair that without the need to open the casing. All you do is ...
1) Open the flap at the top that shows the tape, via pressing down on the release catch to open the top of the cassette.
2) Insert a toothpick or small screwdriver in the gap where the open lid is, in order jam it in the open position and to keep the cassette in the open lid position.
3) You can then pull out the chewed up tape or unwind it from the tape cogs via pressing down on the small tape release lever....then I used to use the rubber eraser tip end of a pencil eraser to move the cogs and unwind and pull out the tape that is chewed up....then
4) cut out the chewed up tape and use a VERY VERY small piece of scotch tape to re-attach the cut tape.
Be careful NOT to use too much scotch tape, because if you do this can stick to the heads on the camcorder drum head and deposit sticky dirt on your camera heads....so use the scotch tape sparingly.
Love you, too
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