vhs to svhs tape

[jmbrooks]

Maybe I'm crazy, but I could swear that some months ago there was a how-to article on Tom's about modifying a high grade vhs tape to svhs. Can anyone help???

 

[iris5u]

Oh yeah. Thats easy. I used to do it all the time to Fuji Super-HG type VHS tapes & always got real good results with my Panasonic AG-1970 & Mitsubishi HS-U69 SVHS decks, even my ancient NEC DS8000U. All you gotta do is drill a small hole in a regular VHS cassette at the same location as the SVHS/VHS-detect-switch hole is on a SVHS cassette. Take a VHS tape, turn it upside down with the tape door facing away from you. Observe there is a 1/8" wide, 1/16" deep slot that runs the entire length of the bottom of the cassette. Starting at the left edge of the cassette & in the slot, measure 3/16" in towards the right edge of the tape & vertically drill a 5/32" hole in the slot thru the cassette shell until you feel no resistance. Remove the drill. Turn the cassette right side up & gently shake out all the plastic debris from the hole. That completes the mod. If you drilled the hole in exactly the right place, it should work. There is a microswitch in all SVHS VCRs that gets closed when the bottom of a regular tape hits it & stays open with a SVHS tape. This fools the SVHS deck into recording in SVHS mode on a plain VHS tape. The tape MUST be high quality for good results. I recommend FUJI Super-HG or FUJI Pro120. JVC used to make a few SVHS decks that could ignore the lack of a hole on a VHS tape & record SVHS onto it, but I'm not sure they still have that feature on their current VCRs. You could check their website & see.

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