Dennis Wingo: Status, late afternoon, November 14, 2013
Lots of frustration today. The first couple of tapes had head clogs so bad they have to go into the oven to bake for a couple of days. Almost all of the tapes today have had some anomaly. Right now Ken has the head off the machine as the current tape (M5-110) dropped a piece of crap on the control track head and now it has to be disassembled and cleaned…
Well that was the good news, the bad is that the control track head on this head is dead and we have to start cannibalizing other heads to see if we can keep this head going…
Stepping back to explain.
There are actually four separate heads on this machine. One is the expensive one for reading video data that we have to refurbish often at great expense. Two more are for the audio track and for the timecode track. The fourth head is the control track head and it reads a signal off the tape that allows the servo control system to synchronize with the tape. This head is worn down to the nubbin on this head and Ken is cannibalizing another head to get this one going….
Official website of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP)