r/VHS • u/DeluxeChoiceVideo • Dec 17 '18
My mold fix
Man, it sucked when I found out about mold - I put in a copy of Jackie Chan's Project A and the picture was terrible. When I checked the tape, it was the first time I'd ever seen mold on a cassette. I went through my entire collection (about 500 at the time) and pulled out 50 that were in varying stages, from a few spots to complete coverage.
After reading some posts on Lunchmeat, I rigged up a little woodworking project, using a cheap thrift-store VCR. The ends of the dowels are wrapped in microfibre cloth, and make contact with both sides of the tape. I put on a mask, ventilate the room, put a little alcohol on each dowel, then fast forward the tape. Then I clean the dowels, re-apply the alcohol and rewind the tape. Sometimes if the mold is bad, I'll run it through two or three times.
If the mold is heavy, I'll open the case and blow it out, swab it down with more alcohol. It can be tricky with some tapes - there's some old Vestron cassettes that have odd screws holding it together, so I'll usually just try to swab the spools through the holes in the top of the case.
Then I put the tape into quarantine for a few months to make sure the growth is dead. Then it's back into the collection!
I should mention that I don't play-test every tape, and sometimes the mold is so heavy that it does affect playback. But if it's a rare tape, most of the time I'm just happy to have it back in my collection that I'd rather keep it even if it doesn't play optimally. But it works! I saved a beloved copy of The Gate this way.
Anyone do anything like this?
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u/MrLateFee Dec 17 '18
Man Im givin you a long distance high five right now. Definitely gonna whip something like this up and upgrade my current mold killing method
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u/blast_processor Jan 21 '19
Just found this before posting about the same thing, 2 questions, have you had long term success with this? I hear people saying that it'll just come back And how much pressure is there on the tape from the dowels? Thanks for the post though 👍
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u/DeluxeChoiceVideo Jan 23 '19
I honestly can't say for sure that it'll never come back, but I can say it's been about a year and it hasn't come back yet, so we'll see.
As far as the pressure on the dowels, you can see that I pass the tape opposite the first head to make sure there's enough pressure without slowing the feed, otherwise it'll stop playing/ffwding/rewinding if it feels too much resistance. I make sure to run it through enough times that I don't see any trace of mold left.
All told, it may be completely useless, but I gotta try!
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u/blast_processor Jan 24 '19
Cheers for the reply Gonna give it a bash this weekend, more and more videos I find in the wild have mold, but I can't pass them up haha
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u/fro99er Mar 20 '26
hello brother, its been about 7 years since you posted,
did the mold ever come back?
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u/[deleted] Dec 17 '18
/u/Famicoman should put this in the sidebar under "Guides". This is great information. I had theorized that something like this would work, but never had the need to try it. You're doing God's work OP.