VCR Head Cleaning How-to

90’s VHS Rehab pt.2

VCR head cleaning is a simple maintenance task. Unfortunately one that was never been done on most machines you find second hand these days. Searching online marketplaces or at the thrift store, even the good machines will be dusty and dirty, sticky and gross. Dirt from playing many tapes in its heyday, and then too few in recent years. It all needs cleaning if we want these machines to survive.

It’s easy to take once ubiquitous technology like the VCR for granted. Even more so, now they’ve been cluttering up our living rooms, basements and storage units for decades past their prime. Most folks won’t ever need or want to touch a VCR again, and that’s no big loss. However, you might be one of the millions who have old VHS or compact VHS tapes stored away. Home movies, memories and other content that isn’t available online today, it is all at risk.

Finding a working, decent quality VCR that you can trust to playback your old tapes is becoming difficult and expensive. Parts simply are not available to repair many models anymore. Even simple expendable rollers and belts can be a huge challenge to source for certain players. Furthermore, depending on how your tapes have been stored, you could be facing their end of life rapidly too.

VHS to Digital

In upcoming episodes, we’re looking at the options out there to transfer your analog VHS tapes. How to make digital files you can watch and share online or archive and backup properly. It’s not as simple or as affordable as you might think either. Many off-the-shelf products result in poor results. Low resolution, low frame rate and otherwise terrible looking digital video files, even at the best of times. We’ll look at those and then build a professional rig to convert analog video sources of all types to digital. We’ll do it on a tight budget with used gear and free software too.

Please leave any questions in the comments on either video. Please also share or repost these anywhere you think folks will be into this kind of stuff. It’s an incredibly small group online who are into this kind of stuff & we need your help finding them.

Watch the first part of the series, we talk about the project and clean up the Sony RMT-V184A remote control.