My old VCR chewed up a tape I found at a garage sale

Happened two days ago. I picked up a box of unlabeled VHS tapes from a garage sale in Tacoma for five bucks. The first one I tried to play got eaten by my VCR about ten minutes in. The tape got all tangled in the mechanism. I had to carefully take the VCR apart to get the tape out, which took me an hour. The tape is pretty much ruined now, which is a real bummer because the first few minutes looked like a home movie from the 80s. Anyone know a good way to clean a VCR's heads before I try another tape?

4 comments

4 Comments

seanh911mo ago

That "unlabeled" part is the real red flag lol. Old tapes can get sticky and wreck your VCR.

faithbaker21d ago

I read the same thing - sticky tape is a real VCR killer.

noah9171mo ago

Is it really that big of a deal? Seanh91 has a point about old tapes, but a lot of them play fine. Just clean the heads with a tape from the store.

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cora40021d ago

I had a stack of about 20 VHS tapes from the late 80s that I tried playing last year, and three of them shed so much oxide I had to pull the top off the VCR and wipe the heads by hand with a cloth. The store-bought cleaning tapes are fine for light dust, but they won't fix the sticky residue that old degraded tape leaves behind. If you have tapes stored in a hot attic or damp basement you are taking a real gamble. It's not every tape that goes bad, but the ones that do can mess up your machine pretty fast.