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Discussion: dehydration of tape reels, and making your own dessicator

[Editing note: This is a long set of posts, the executive summary is that humidity degrades tapes. We recommend a vacuum approach for dehydration, but you can also use a simpler, though slower, technique using desiccants. We don’t recommend baking. It does work, but we  don’t like the risk of a damage-causing mistakes. Once the tape is dehydrated, treatment with our Tape Preservative prevents re-absorption of moisture. Note – the dehydration process can actually restore some of the tape binder integrity , not just stop degradation. So if you are going to dehydrate your tapes, we advise doing that, then treating with Tape Preservative, before playing them. We will clean up this post to make it more concise, but until we get there, hopefully this helps!] Continue reading Discussion: dehydration of tape reels, and making your own dessicator