Wanted: Rubber drive wheel for HP 9144 tape drive

[Tony Duell]

Please format your text to somwhere between 72 and 80 columns...

> 
> I'm trying to help a friend locate a replacement tape drive wheel for 
> an HP 9144 tape drive.  He says that there's a hard roller inside the 
> tape cartridge, and there's a softer (rubber?) roller in the drive that 
> pushes against it, pulling the tape along.  Apparently the softer 
> rollers tend to turn to "goo" after many years.  He's been working to 
> recover some archived files from the beginnings of the company he works 
> for, mostly for historical interest, and his last tape drive recently 
> succumbed to the "goo" problem.  Anyone have any replacement rollers 
> that would be in any better shape, or any suggestions for alternatives?  
> Thanks! 

This is a well-known problem with HP tape drives (and magnetic card 
readers) and, indeed, with such devices more genreally.

I've had some success replacing the roller with a suitable-size silicone 
rubber O-ring, but often you have to turn a groove into the original 
metal hub, and you may even need to make a new hub so you can make a deep 
enough groove for the O-ring to stay in place. This gets difficult if the 
hub also carries a tachometer disk or similar.

Silicone rubber tubing works well if you can find it of the right size 
and wall thickness. It should just fit on the original hub once you've 
cleaned the gunge off.

-tony