Video tape breaks. It happens. Sadly, the entire cassette then becomes unserviceable. With home movie film at least we can discard one side of the film and retain the other side. But with video cassettes the game is lost. Of course we can splice the tape but the task is not for the faint of heart. Merely opening the cassette and being able to reassemble it is the first challenge. But there are many YouTube videos on how to do this but again, it is not for the faint of heart.
In the example shown, somebody attempted a splice which does not look all that bad. Sometimes you can get away with doing that. But in this case there was a very negative effect. When the consumer spliced the tape he left a nick you can see in the illustration to the left of the splice. This became a weakness for a new break. This new break was 100 times worse than the original in that the tape split down the middle for several feet. This type of problem cannot be fixed. The section of tape so split is lost.
You can see in the last illustration where the newly spliced tape has been properly situated back into the cassette. Shown also is the forever lost tape together with the splicing jig. Even with the jig, it is a major challenge to spice the tape. But at least the jig allows for a clean and highly aligned cut with a rudimentary chance of accomplishing these things. The major stumbling block is the anti-static nature of the magnetic tape. It clings to your hands so we depend on the jig to retain the tape. It does this to a large extent but when we cut the tape diagonally with a razor blade things start going haywire. The jig is only able to retain with a slight force and the tape inevitably comes loose. It is a trial and error process.
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