Source of 1" paper tape?

Good heavens above ! I wonder if they are the same GNT who made tape punches and readers back in the 1970's. I'm amazed it's still available, many thanks for the link.

AWEM

Andrew,

Punched paper tape was used up till recently in the commercial printing of 35mm movie film. The grading instructions were generated by the grader before printing and were stored on paper tape which was read by the printer controls as the printing was done. It is probably still being done that way, but I've been retired from the film lab business for almost two years so things could have changed in that time. :-)

Jim.

I was going to suggest a rather narrow bog roll..................

Images of outhouse door with roll of emery tape hanging from nail..

Mark Rand RTFM

I have several rolls of the stuff. New in the box. Probably 25 years old. If you pay shipping you can have it. But I'm in the USA. Seattle area. Eric

Very kind Eric - I'll pop on a plane and come and see you

AWEM

Reminds me of a minor archiving problem we had back in the days when we used this stuff for real live process control systems...the listings amd the source (paper) tapes of each system we sold were archived in cardboard boxes in a corner of the factory. One of our customers managed to lose all of his system master tapes & asked us for a duplicate set; the project manager unearthed the archive box to find that the archive for that system had been converted into nest material by a family of rats...

Regards, Tony

I'm roasting a pig the first saturday in August. It'll be the 17th pig I've roasted. I've had folks from France get off the plane, drive up here, eat pig, drink beer, and camp out. I'll reserve some lawn chairs for you and a camp site. How many in your party? I wonder though how much it would cost to ship it to you? I wonder if book rate would work. The tape is the good stuff. Oiled so that it punches well and doesn't wear out the punches so fast. I only have one machine left that used to read paper tape but it has been converted with a tape reader emulator for direct hookup to a computer for a long time. Eric Eric

Probably around the same time I had the task of getting Mobil's control system back on line at their Coryton refinery in Essex. The Burroughs 2 mB dick had crashed and a total re-load was required. Only problem was there was no image, only the original Fortran source code on paper tape. I worked out later that we loaded 14.2 MILES of paper tape that night, just to generate 2 mB of machine code !!!!!!

AWEM

We had a machine of this vintage in a toolroom I ran many years ago. When we went over to PC based CAM we installed a BTR (behind tape reader) which can have a serial link directly to a PC so does away with tape. I noticed that GNT list these on their web site, might be worth looking in to. Cutting speed will be much lower than more modern machines, but as you just walk away and leave it to do its thing that isn't an issue -better to be cautious than risk it snapping

5 minutes after you walk out of the door to leave it cutting all night, I swear they know when you are looking and only snap when you aren't!!

In my first job after leaving school we had paper tape readers for some large flame cutting machines. All the Master tapes with important info on for archiving were always punched on mylar tape instead of paper tape. Paper tape stretches, tears, gets wet, and generally doesn't last very well. Funny, every time night shift had a job they didn't like the paper tape got torn so they couldn't do that job -had to be done the next day when I was back at work to punch a new tape.

At least if using paper tape you'll never have to buy another box of wedding confetti.

Kevin

The chads from paper tape are actually quite dangerous if airborne. They can and do get into the lungs and fester. Oddly enough I'm negotiating with GNT over a BTR at the moment ! Slowly getting them to think hobby budget not large scale production!

AWEM

If it is any help, I am in Pittsburgh next week and happy to put it in my luggage for the return trip.

Probably cheaper posting internal to US and internal to UK than international shipping.

Contact me off list if you want to proceed. I fly out Sunday, back the following Friday.

Cheers

Peter

Peter,

That is extremely kind, but by means of a contact on another forum I have cornered the world supply of 1" paper tape - I think I have something between 70 -100 rolls which probably will last me my lifetime!

Dare I ask how the Disco is progressing?

Andrew

Disco - it came, it was welded, I blew the engine, I replaced the engine, it was used (then became too small for the Spinone) and it was sold!

Replaced by a Volvo 850!

Cheers

Peter