I don't understand how the world got to this point with rubber and rubber coatings. I'm talking about the rubberized coatings on things like binoculars, some portable electronics, etc. Also, certain plastics exhibit the same characteristics. I have 4 or 5 guitar holders and two of them have clamps that split at the screw holes when the plastic melted, for lack of a better word. This caused the guitars (a dual stand) in one case to hit the floor. For the longest, time I thought it was related to the hand lotion my wife uses, but that didn't make sense. Didn't stop me from blaming her!
Yesterday I bought another DAT audio deck, can't have enough tape decks, and it was failing. I was told "it worked yesterday!" That was a load of crap because when I opened it up, the load belt was mush. Just picking it up caused it to fall apart. This was a rubber belt the size of a rubber band you would used for teeth braces. I found them online, but wanted to test the deck in the worst way, so I pulled the o-ring out of a pen flashlight and stuck it on, and it worked! I have two other DAT decks, both have issues with the pinch rollers related to the same gummy problem. I collect calculators with mag card readers and they have the same problem. In their case, I scrape the gum off until I get to the hub and then used small o-rings. This trick also got my Sony dat deck working temporarily until the new roller came in.
I see people clean this gunk off using IPA at stronger concentrations. I've tried it, it's a lot of work and it leaves the finish looking horrible, better than being gummy, I guess. But given the world-wide extent of the problem, it seems like consumers collectively sort of got screwed!
This problem seemed to show-up about 10yrs or so ago, which means whatever process was being used starting about 20yrs ago kicked this off. I don't remember it being this bad when I was younger.
Comments?
Jerry
p.s. and don't talk me out of tape decks! I use Reel to Reel on my analog setup, LTO tape on my computers, DAT tape on my digital machines. When I was a kid a ran around recording everything onto a small cassette player.