So my daughter found a couple of unlabeled, mud filled vhs tapes in a creek. Being the curious sort, I’d love to know what’s on them. A quick Google gave me two conflicting tips about cleaning vhs tapes. One says absolutely don’t open them but the other says to do so and clean the reels by hand. Anyone have personal experience with this to give some tips? Thanks!
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Forget it. They’re goners. Even after a decent cleaning the chances of the tapes harming your VCR are very high and the chances of getting anything interesting off them is tiny.
And cleaning would absolutely, positively involve taking the cassette apart and gently hand washing the unspooled tapes. That’s 811 feet for a T-120 tape. You have to be really compulsive to want to deal with unspooling, cleaning, drying and spooling all that.
You still have a vcr player? Wow!!
Come to think of it, I probably do too, somewhere…
Opening a VHS cartridge is easy. Closing it back up is more of a challenge. There are springs coiled up inside the cartridge that will release when you open it. Getting them aligned right so you can close the case back properly is difficult (but not impossible).
Is there any possibility that you could immerse the tapes in room-temperature water and rinse the mud off of them? If so, and if you can dry them without incurring mold growth, you might be able to read them.
You may have to sacrifice a VCR to this project, due to the residual mud and debris. If the tapes are of commercial video, or from TV shows, it might not be worth it. It depends on how curious you are, how much of a gamble you want to take, and how much time and cost you are willing to throw away. Buying a sacrificial VCR on eBay might be your best option right now.
Opening and closing a cassette isn’t that hard, in spite of what Little Nemo says. For that matter, you can discard the springs and interlocks entirely and the cassette will play just fine. I’d say cleaning & drying the insides is most important right now.
I’ll save you the trouble. It’s porn.
Or worse, homemade porn. Aaaccckk!
7 days
How about getting a professional photographer or someone to see what they can do, or have them reccomend someone? I’d never attempt something like that myself.
Almost certainly blank or they’ll have old Rockford Files or some similar vintage program on. And they’ll probably damage your VCR player. Not worth the candle as they say…
My advice? Don’t bother. Even if you could get them clean, chances are you wouldn’t want to see what’s on them anyway.
I agree - the only sort of treatment that has a decent chance of working would be the sort of cleaning that a national security agency would undertake if they believed the tapes contained some vital evidence of something - lots of space and equipment to carefully unwind the tapes without causing further damage, very gentle cleaning, possibly with specialist materials, then re-spooling into something for playback (but that might not be a cassette body)
My advice is also not to bother. That being said though ---- I have a couple old VCRs laying around and probably would blow the time and effort myself. Curiosity is just that strong of a force.
As a result of that philosophy, I have a cat that has only 8 lives left.
first take apart a spare vhs tape that you don’t want anymore that’s clean so you’ll know what’s there and how they operate. take the spools & tape out too. set them aside.
next take apart the other (muddy) one. take out the spools with the tape attached.
inspect the tapes general condition. if a large part of it looks clean enough, and if the guts are the same, put the spools/tape into the clean housing. (the guts will of course be the same in function but there’s perhaps some differences brand to brand that could make this not be 100% seamless.)
if you can’t just do a complete install, but there’s some tape that looks ok in the spooled area, remove tape off the first spool at least even to what you’re going to splice back onto it from the tape you found. splice it into the reel of the 1st tapes reel at the very front of the tape. you’ll need scissors, scotch tape and clean hands.
put it back together and try it out.
your little splice may give you some idea as to what’s on the rest of the tape, it’d of course be impossible to say though.
I’ve had to fix screwed up tapes a long time ago doing this. i know it can work. the question is is the tape you’re wanting to view screwed up.
since it got found in the mud, my guess is it’s a ‘dirty’ movie.
Brilliant! There is almost no chance the section of tape that has remained spooled has grit in it (although it may have gotten sticky).
The tape could still foul the heads in your VCR, but you might be surprised at just how useful a simple pencil eraser can be for rehabilitating nasty VCR heads.
How many weeks old is this remarkable cat that still has 8 lives?
My doctor says I’ve already used up 6 lives. I’ve told her that two more and I am going to find a new doctor so I can start over with a fresh bank.
She is a personal friend but there are still times she says she hates me. 