Several places on cassette not running smoothly

Hi,

I’ve discovered that one of my cassettes (Sting - Ten Summoner’s Tales) is having trouble playing/winding at 3 places
I first discovered this when my 300 player stopped the cassette at track 4 and turned to side B and searched but couldn’t find any track-info.

I started to FFWD the tape and got to track 5 at around 0:50 into the song and then the player slowed down the winding for a second and then got back to normal speed.
Only to repeat the exact same behaviour at track 6 approx 1:30 into that track.
After that the player winded normally again.

When winding this tape in any direction the player always slows down for a second at these three places (track 4 0:30, track 5 0:50 and track 6 1:30) as if the tape was sticky or something at these places.
I let the player wind the tape forwards and backwards (the whole lenght of the tape) approx 10 times and that made two of the slowed-down places to disapppear. But the place at track 6 wouldn’t go away.
The player still slows down a second when passing that spot in Ffwd/Rew.

I guess this has to do with a sticky tape or is there something else going on?
Has anyone experienced the same thing?

This is caused by the tape not being rewound to the beginning and lying around for longer times.
Sticky deposit from felt pads inside the cassette gets on the tape and causes this.
You could try PREV and NEXT buttons (in stead of FFWD en REW) a couple of times over the bad spots.
That solves it most of the times. If not, there’s a video somewhere about cleaning backside of the tape.

Good luck!
Henrie

Tip: Always rewind your cassettes to the beginning (or end) to prevent this from happening.

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Hi and welcome.

This video might help.

Restoring a Digital Compact Cassette and solving your dropouts

Ralf

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I had a feeling this was the case.
I didn’t know about the PREV/NEXT thing.
I will definitely try that.
Big Thanks!

All of my tapes I’ve got so far are used (except for 3 that are still in shinkwrap) and come from the same seller. When I went through all the tapes I noticed that none of them were fully rewinded.

Thats great.
Thank you for helping out.
Highly appreciated.

When using PREV/NEXT, the head touches the tape, and presses it a bit to the visible felt pad of the cassette. This way the tape gets cleaned in an ‘onorthodox’ way.

This really is only a quick fix, and does not work every time. If it is persistent, use the video of Ralf to carefully clean the tape.