sorry the "w" key got stuck and didn't enter on the title and I didn't catch till it was too late.

Was with my father one weekend about 6 months ago. Looking for a document in his gun safe. "Oh, I forgot about these" and he hands me a stack of 8mm tapes. "These are your aunts, your other aunt gave them to me and told me to keep them in a safe place." The only saving grace is my Dad uses a de-humidifier because of his expensive shotguns. I recovered all of them.

Another way is to remove the tape from the spool by destroying the reel. Apply 99% isopropyl alcohol on both sides of the tape to soften the sticky parts. Tedious but effective.

I worked on a receiver that was very moldy inside. After cleaning loose debris with a vacuum followed by isopropyl, I place it with an ion generator in a bag for several days which helped alleviate the smell considerably.

If you were to make a slow tape winder, maybe a case vibration addition could loosen the mould. maybe you might have an old knackered deck that would save you doing it by hand.

New job title: Master Demolder!

This looks more like "sticky shed syndrome" than mold. I've transferred moldy tapes before and the mold appears across the edge pack as a powdery, white residue.

I've never found mold on 8 mm or DVs. On the other hand, improperly stored VHS tapes get disgustingly moldy, sometimes with an appearance of and old fruit exposed to the elements. Around here, technicians use "sacrificial players", machines with everything broken except the tape transport mechanism, as the base of their tape cleaning machines.

Almost like looking for the end of sellotape.

I converted a vhs rewinder to have speed control. It can also accept betamax tapes and for video 8 by using spare vhs spools. Im still trying to find a way for umatic tapes.

Hi @12voltvids, thanks for all these tips. I’ve been watching your videos on camcorder repairs and I’d like to know if there’s any hope for when the connector that comes through the head gets broken. I’m guessing there isn’t, but I’d really like to explore all options before I give up on this thing. Thank you

Again, you have a lot of patience. But it's a good thing! Would storing in a safe with silica packs help?

Hey Dave, can you use a small drop of suber glue to splice ? What are your suggestions ? I used to re-splice 8 track audio tapes with a Radio Shack kit, but that is all used up and stowed somewhere .

I've done a lot of work on mouldy 8mm tapes, some much worse than this. I've put a rig together which helps, but it's still a time consuming process. Fuji branded tapes are the worst but any 8mm tape can be affected. The problem being that the mould is stronger than the tape, hence the snaps, which can be very long tails taking out several minutes of tape before a full snap stops the player. I have 8mm tape splicing blocks and proper splicing tape. Ordinary sticky tape is a disaster.

I have some music tapes which sound really poor the sound goes lounder and quieter every few secs.

I have a VHS tape of The man who saw tomorrow. it still looks good except now when it gets at almost the end. The picture just shows snow? If it's contaminated? Is there anyway to fix it?

What’s best way to store tapes?

How did you splice?

Nice video! Having been around IT hardware for a number of years, I’ve worked with a number of different storage media and your video serves as a good reminder to everyone that people with data stored on DVD’s, CD’s and floppy disks need to get their data archived off as their data is at risk of being unrecoverable as the media and hardware ages. This is especially true for old backups on tape streamers and proprietary media. Additionally, as technology advances the file formats which were used to store the original data may have ceased to be used which also presents compatibility issues. At least with computer data such as photos and word-processor documents you don’t have to worry so much about compression and conversion issues as you do with video. However computers, tablets and phones store a lot of valuable data which is often irreplaceable in many ways. My advice to everyone is to go through all of their important data both on your computer devices and on your backups and work out what you NEED to keep and make sure that you ensure that ,A) the data is readable and B) that you archive anything which you think you might need to cloud storage or to local storage (flash drives, SSD’s) as when its gone its gone. Services like doropbox offer cloud storage for really very little money when compared to the cost of paying someone to recover content from old media / computers. Finally, dropbox offers apps which can go on your phone and tablet which can automatically upload your photos and videos to the cloud meaning that you wont need to worry so much about them being lost.

this is what happens when theres mold on a tape, but theres no mold on it LMAO hilarious