Surgery

When you are an aficionado of VHS tapes, you're dealing with a lot of old, beaten-down specimens. Most tapes are, in my experience, in surprisingly good shape. Ones that were still in shrink-wrapped plastic showed some of the worst deterioration, oddly enough. Anyway, I've had good luck with tapes mostly ( although it's true that I've always passed up ones that I suspected might be trouble), but not always.

For the first time I can think of, I went inside a tape. There was this little bit of plastic rattling around inside of it. That really bothered me, but I might have left it alone except for the fear I had that it would somehow get caught up in the tape as it played and wreck both cassette as well as player. I didn't quite know what to do, but a friend suggested that I simply unscrew the tape open to get the plastic bit. I did so, and that was the easy part.

I made the rookie mistake of simply pulling the bottom half off, leaving the guts of the tape lying on the top half. This is evidently not what you do. As a consequence, a couple of little parts- a metal pin and a plastic capstan- came out, and I was at quite a loss as to where they went. I was determined to not write them off as "spare parts". A poorly reassembled tape could do even more harm than one with a potentially cosmetic defect.

Ultimately, I figured out where everything went with a little help from online sources, but mostly with my own critical thinking. I was delighted when the tape played properly instead of catastrophically failing. I then had the confidence to tackle a second tape that had been bothersome, only to find it had four normal screws and one whose like I had never seen before. That one will have to wait for another day, as will any sense of arrogance based on a perceived mastery of VHS repair.