VHS Splice

My friend Alec and I were walking into Fremont the other day to eat some food and we noticed a mess of shiny black tape near some bushes. It looked as if someone pulled all the tape out of a VHS cassette. It was weird, because we couldn't find the actual cassette. Some how I got the idea to grab a few samples of the tape to bring home and try to splice it into an existing cassette. I had never done it, but I figured it would work.

We didn't have any trouble splicing the tape, but it was a challenge closing the cassette casing properly. We kept putting it in the VCR, but it'd spit it out immediately. After about 20 minutes of fiddling with it, we finally knew it was ready.

The suspense was incredible. On the one hand, we were a little nervous to what we might find, since it seemed like someone wanted to destroy the tape, but in another way, it was kind of like Christmas.

I popped the tape in, pressed play, and a dull tone sounded for about 5 seconds and I assumed that I had spliced the particular strip of tape upside down (it was really tough to figure out which side was right), but seconds later there was another sound and static... then bits of color, then shifting static and sound, then more... a person! A secret angent.... on skiis... 007!

We were the proud owners of someone's TV recording of one of the old 007 movies recorded off TBS. Yesssss. Alec and I cheered. It was totally worth it.