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My dad swore by adjusting the tracking on VHS tapes with a butter knife | Blast from the Past - Free To Speak

My dad swore by adjusting the tracking on VHS tapes with a butter knife

Tried it on a grainy copy of The Empire Strikes Back last night and it actually cleared the picture up for about 20 seconds before the tape got chewed up, so I guess that advice was half right, has anyone else fallen for a weird old fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

sanchez.mary1mo ago

Wait, are we really acting like a butter knife on a VHS tape is some tragic loss? That tape was probably already on its last legs if a little spin with a butter knife killed it. People act like these things are sacred artifacts when half of them were recorded over with bad TV static anyway. It's not like you lost a master copy of a lost film, you just bought yourself 20 seconds of slightly clearer picture before the tape remembered it was a rental from Blockbuster in 1996.

claire_grant341mo ago

Rental from Blockbuster in 1996" actually made me snort laugh. You're totally right. I had a copy of The Lion King that my little brother tried to "fix" with a butter knife when the tracking went bad. That tape was already held together with hope and a prayer. It had been dropped on concrete and run over by a bike at some point. The butter knife just finished what life had already started. People get way too precious about these things like we're handling rare film reels or something.

gavin3651mo ago

So you're saying that tape was basically a lost cause before the butter knife even touched it? I gotta ask @sanchez.mary, was that Lion King tape the same one that had that weird tracking issue where the static lines looked like a zebra pattern? Because I remember a buddy of mine had a copy of Jurassic Park that did the same thing, and no butter knife in the world was gonna fix that mess, it just made the whole thing unwatchable.