inside this faux alligator skin briefcase is my collection of vintage cassette tapes and the one
thing these all have in common is that they do not use the typical philips style clamshell case
that we all know and love with the clear front and it opens like that and you put the cassette in
like that and everybody who's used the cassette in the past 40 years or so is very familiar with this
these are different most of them have what is known as a snap case because it snaps open and
closed like that and it's a completely solid plastic case with a paper label stuck on it and
a few others have what is called a slide case like this bee gees cassette and it just slides in from
the side like that it's a rather unusual bright pink cassette and that just slides in like that
so these are all not your typical cassettes and these are all from around 1966 to the early to mid
1970s i think the newest one here is this one from 1975 which was the tail end of this kind of case
design and we're listening to one of these right now this 101 strings cassette from the late 1960s
i already did a video talking all about the history of pre-recorded cassette tapes
and giving more audio samples of what some of these sound like
even after 50 years but today i want to focus on this one which had an unfortunate incident
when i was trying to play it if you look inside there not only is that foam pad
completely disintegrating because this was before they standardized on that little
felt pad on a spring on some of these they just stuck a piece of foam in there like an 8-track
and not only that you don't see any tape in it because it snapped off right at the end
when i was rewinding it so unfortunately this one is not screwed so we'll need to crack it open and
try to fix it this one is from 1972 so we're going to be fixing hopefully a 50 year old cassette
i actually already had the same thing happen to this cassette which is from around 1968 it's
another snap case and with this one what happened to it is that it got very sticky it would hardly
move at all when i put in any cassette player it would often just kick off the auto stop because it
had too much tension required to move the tape and the tape itself was fine the problem was that the
original clear plastic leaders i think they were originally a pink color had gotten sticky with age
so what i did with this one is i was able to crack it open unfortunately i broke off
a little piece of it there in the process but otherwise it survived and i transplanted in
a new leader tape on each end from a donor cassette so that's the new yellow leader tape
there's where i spliced it on to the original magnetic tape that was in this from 1968
and if you look closely you can also see where i put in a conventional
spring style pressure pad you push on it and it
springs a little bit on top of the remnants of the original foam pad that was glued down
and it just so happens that the cassette shell had the little slots for one of these spring pads
so i think happened with these cassettes is that they were originally designed for this
spring pad and then at some point they started to cheapen out on them in the late 60s early 70s
by putting in these foam pads i think this was when they were trying to compete with playtapes
which were that briefly popular tape format aimed at kids and teenagers in the late 60s
and those were probably a lot cheaper than cassettes so what they tried to
do was make cassettes cheaper to compete with them and unfortunately they really
cheapened out on the materials in these by using that foam pad which disintegrates
this is a grt tape and this one that just broke on me the flip wilson cassette from 1972 doesn't say
grt on it but otherwise it's identical the same color scheme the same shell the same stamp on it
and that same crappy foam pad and this probably what happened to this the same thing the leader
got sticky so we'll need to crack it open splice in new leaders scrape off what's off this foam pad
transplant in a new spring pad and then hopefully we'll be able to get this one playing again
and to crack it open i have this tool kit with tools designed to open smartphones and tablets
unfortunately this is a rather cheap set and one of them already broke on
me that's why there's a missing tool here but otherwise we still have some
that we could possibly use to crack open the cassette
and i also have this donor cassette that i can use to put in a new spring pad and to take the
leader tape from this is some cheap no-name 10-minute cassette and it's a screwed shell
so if i need to i could just transplant this entire tape into this shell and you can kind of
see this label is already starting to peel off so maybe i can just steam off the entire label
and stick it on this one but first i'll try to save this shell since it's original
and just get started at trying to crack this one open i didn't even need any tools i just took a
tip i learned from a video from dr dcc about how to crack open a dcc "the trick come up how
to open this cassette is basically to do that and this way" you just twist on it very hard
and this one i could hear cracking and i think it started to crack at the back here you can see yeah
so i didn't even need any tools to get this one started i just need to
put some elbow muscle into it whatever that phrase is
elbow grease that's what i was talking about you can see i'm now trying to crack open the rest
of it and this is going to be the hardest part because that's where the business end of it is
but looks like we're getting somewhere there we go almost there
okay we're open and it's already coming apart so let me try to spool that back together
so there's our 50 year old spool of tape which i put some painters tape on to keep
it from unspooling on me and it actually snapped the tape itself not the leader
but this leader tape needs to go because i had a bad experience with that lawrence welk
tape the leader getting sticky and i don't want that happen to this one so i'm just
gonna open up this donor cassette and take the new leader out of it and splice it on to this
here's another sign of cheapness of this cassette design in addition to just having this foam pad
glued to the metal shield there it doesn't even use rollers the tape just runs across these
fixed plastic posts and these slip sheets are coated with graphite which of course wears away
over time so i'm also going to be transplanting in new slip sheets here is our donor cassette
i unscrewed it and here's the new slip sheets which i'll transplant
and it has one of those spring pads and i'm going to be cutting off the tape on this because i don't
need it i just want this leader tape and i'm going to take this little spring thing and put that in
and hopefully we'll have all the parts we need to fix that 50 year old cassette
and this is where it really helps to have a cassette splicing kit you get the splicing
block new splicing tape to attach the tape back together if you need to splice it in
the middle or to attach it to the leader at the end and a razor blade you can get these online
there's the new donor leader tape in the slicing block so i'll just carefully cut that
and we don't want to throw this entire thing away because we'll need
the leader tape at the other end of this but for now we can do one end of our splice of the
new leader tape there is the broken end of the 50 year old tape and the splicing block
so i'll just carefully cut off the excess and take that away
and now bring in our new donor leader and put that in the splicing block
being careful not to get it twisted and i'll do the same thing i'll cut it at an angle
now i cut off a little piece of that splicing tape and i'll just carefully
lay it down on top of that splice now
we can take this out of the splicing block
and there's the new leader transplanted on to the end of that 50 year old tape
for now what i'll do since we'll still need to do the same thing at the other end of it
is i'll transplant it into this new donor shell just so we can temporarily put this
back together so i can fast forward it all the way to the other end and do the same thing
there's that 50 year old tape spliced onto the new leader and just temporarily we're going to
put it back in this donor shell i only put back in one screw because that's all we need for now
to hold it together to fast forward it with this hand winder to the other end of the tape
and there we can see where it is still attached to the original sticky
blue leader tape which will also need to splice out and splice into new donor
leader tape so i won't show that on camera it'll just be the same process as i showed before
i also need to get to the other end of this donor tape and since i don't need to save it
i can have some fun with it now whee... now i have cassette salad here
and there's our leader tape at the other end it pains me a little bit
to see that but at least it's going to good purpose of fixing this 50 year old cassette
there's the new leader spliced onto the other end of the tape i decided i'm going to try to save the
original shell because i tested it and it still pretty much snaps back together i did break off
two of the plastic pegs but the other two are still left and it still has these
non rollers they actually fit together to hold it together but i'm transplanting in new slip sheets
that new spring pad which fits into the slots that was originally designed to
have one even though this originally had one of those crappy foam pads instead
the only thing is i forgot which side is which so i'm just going to temporarily put
this back together and if the wrong side is playing on what is supposed
to be the a side i'll just have to open it up again and flip it over
that's the new leader tape the new spring pad now i just have to play this and make sure
the right side is playing i'm just going to be using this cheap emerson boom box
and hopefully we'll be hearing the correct side which starts with great quotations otherwise
if we hear the great motorbike and tennis shoe race then we'll know we got the sides backwards
and this one it goes in upside down so it goes in like that and i'll hit play
all right that sounds like that motorbike race so we got our sides backwards
so i'll need to open it up and flip it around but otherwise it's playing
a repaired 50 year old cassette i'll just fast forward it a little bit more
"...motorbike he said but uh i bought my tennis shoes down because i wanted you to see my tennis
shoes in charge of tennis shoes but i'll say yeah i said my tennis shoes i wanted you to see him
said i'm as proud of my tennis shoes as you all that motorbike said in fact nothing will..." now
the other side "...then he said if the bird can't sing i don't want him i want a real singer and i
said look if i tell you the bird can sing the bird can sing so come here i'll let you see my best
singer there he is that bird can really sing his arrangements to all of his tunes when he starts
to sing those other birds shut up and listen because they know that this bird got talent."
that's how to do advanced surgery and repair of a cassette tape
"the greatest quotation made by a woman was made by a girl named sarah johnson and it
was made when i was coming in to do the show out at the los angeles airport it was sarah johnson
whom i heard tell the airlines service representative there
if you can fly this plane 600 miles an hour in the dark and find los angeles you can find my bags"