VHS Tape Stuck in the VCR? What to Do Next

There is a particular sound a video recorder makes when it has stopped playing and started chewing. A whirr that goes on too long, a click, and then silence with the tape still inside. Press eject and nothing happens, or the drawer comes halfway out with a loop of brown tape trailing from it. It is a horrible moment, and it is horrible for a specific reason: the tape that is wrapped around the mechanism right now is nearly always the recording you put in because it mattered.

The good news is that a jammed tape is usually still a complete tape, and most of the damage that happens in these situations happens in the minute after the jam, when someone pulls. This guide is the calm version of that minute. It explains why machines jam, the safe sequence to follow, when it is reasonable to open the lid and how to do it, what to do with the tape afterwards, and the point at which the right answer is to stop and hand it to someone with the tools.

Stop. Switch off. Do not pull.

Before anything else, press stop, and if the machine is still whirring or clicking, switch it off at the front and then at the wall. A VCR that is trying to eject a tape that is caught will keep pulling until something gives, and the thing that gives is the tape.

Do not pull on the cassette. Do not pull on any tape you can see. Inside the machine, the tape has been drawn out of the shell and threaded around a spinning drum and a set of guides and rollers. Pulling from outside stretches the section around the drum or snaps it, and that section is the part of the recording that was playing when the jam happened.

If you know nothing else from this guide, know that. A tape that is left alone for ten minutes while you read on is in far better shape than one that has been tugged.

Why the machine jammed

It helps to know what has gone wrong, because it tells you what you will find inside. A VCR pulls tape out of the cassette with a loading mechanism, wraps it partway around the head drum, and moves it past the drum using a rubber pinch roller pressed against a metal capstan. The take-up reel winds the tape back into the shell as it goes. The whole thing depends on several rubber parts that were designed to last about a decade, and every machine in the country is now well past that. There is more on the mechanism itself in our guide to how a VHS recorder handles tape, and the short version is that it is a delicate transport running on perished rubber.

The common failures look like this:

• The take-up reel stops pulling. A perished belt or a slipping clutch means tape is fed out by the capstan faster than it is wound in. The slack loops around the pinch roller or the drum and is wound in, which is what people mean by the machine eating the tape.
• The pinch roller has gone sticky or hard. Old rubber either grips the tape and drags it sideways, creasing it, or lets it slip so it bunches.
• The loader fails halfway. The mechanism that unthreads the tape before ejecting stalls, so the drawer tries to come out with the tape still wrapped around the drum.
• The tape is shedding. A tape whose binder has broken down leaves sticky residue on the guides and squeals as it moves, until it stops moving at all.
• The cassette is the problem. A cracked shell, a stuck reel hub or a loose tape pack inside the cassette can jam a healthy machine.

Second-hand decks jam because they have been sitting in a cupboard for fifteen years with the rubber slowly perishing. If you are choosing a machine, the things to look at before you buy are set out in what to check on a second-hand VHS player, and the first of them is whether it can load and eject a blank tape cleanly.

The safe sequence, in order

Work through these in turn and stop at the first one that frees the tape.

1. Power off at the front, then unplug at the wall. Leave the machine for a minute. Some decks reset their loading mechanism when power is removed and will complete an eject on the next power-up.
2. Plug in, power on, and press eject once. Once. Listen. A clean eject sounds like a short whirr and a click. A grinding or repeated clicking means the loader is fighting the tape, so power off again straight away.
3. Look through the flap or the drawer opening with a torch. If the cassette is sitting in the tray and there is no tape visible outside the shell, the loader has probably unthreaded and the drawer is simply stuck; a gentle press on the cassette while pressing eject can sometimes free it. If you can see tape looped outside the shell, stop here and go to the next section.
4. Try the manual eject, if the deck has one. Some machines have a small hole or lever on the underside or behind the front flap that winds the loading mechanism by hand. The manual for your model will say. Turn it slowly and only in the direction the manual gives.

If none of that works, the tape is still threaded around the mechanism, and the only way to get it out without damage is from inside the machine.

Opening the lid without making it worse

This is reasonable to do yourself on an ordinary VCR, provided you are careful and the machine is unplugged. It is not reasonable on a TV and VCR combi unit, where the tape mechanism sits alongside a television chassis that can hold a dangerous charge even when unplugged. For a combi, stop at the previous section and take the whole unit to someone who can open it safely.

For a standalone deck, with the machine unplugged, take out the screws holding the top cover and lift it straight up. You will see the cassette sitting in its cage, the silver head drum at an angle, and tape running from the shell around the drum, through a set of guide posts, and between the capstan and the black rubber pinch roller.

Three rules apply from here.

• Never touch the drum with your fingers. The heads on it are tiny, fragile and easily knocked out of alignment. If you need to move tape off the drum, do it by moving the tape, not the drum.
• Handle tape by its edges. Fingerprints on the recording surface will be dragged across the heads on the next play. Cotton gloves are ideal. Clean, dry fingers on the edges will do.
• No tools near the tape. No tweezers, no screwdriver tips, no scissors. Fingers only, and a wooden pencil if you need to turn a reel.

Follow the tape from the cassette around the mechanism and find where it is caught. Usually it is wrapped around the pinch roller, bunched between the roller and the capstan, or looped around a guide post. Free it gently, unwinding rather than pulling, until the tape hangs in a loose loop between the cassette and the mechanism. If the tape is wrapped around the drum, ease it off by lifting the loop away and rotating the tape around the drum's surface without pressing on it.

Once the tape is free of everything, you have a cassette with a long loop of tape hanging out of it. Do not wind the loop back in by hand yet. Lift the cassette out of the cage first, keeping the loop from catching on anything, and take it well away from the machine.

Winding loose tape back into the shell

Turn the cassette over. On the underside are two reel hubs with teeth. Pressing the small release button on the back edge of the cassette, or the tab beside the flap, lets the reels turn. Put a finger or a pencil into the hub of the take-up reel, the one the loose tape is coming from, and turn it slowly so the tape winds back in flat and even. Keep light tension on the loop with your other hand so it does not fold over on itself as it goes in.

Go slowly and watch the tape as it enters the shell. If it twists, stop and untwist it. If a section is creased, let it wind in creased rather than trying to flatten it with your fingers; the crease will cause a burst of noise on playback but will not stop the tape playing. When the loop is fully in and the pack looks even through the window, close the flap and put the cassette in a case.

If the tape is snapped, wind each end back into its own reel and stop. A snapped tape can be spliced so the reel plays through with a short gap at the join, but it is a job for a splicing block and the correct tape, not sticky tape from the drawer. What can and cannot be recovered from a creased, stretched or broken tape is set out in which kinds of VHS damage can be repaired.

If the loose tape came out with white or grey powder on it, or the section around the mechanism was tacky and left residue on the guides, the tape itself is the reason for the jam rather than the machine. The first case is mould, the second is a tape whose binder has broken down, and the safe next steps for both are in our guide to mouldy and shedding VHS tapes.

Do not put it back in

The natural next step is to put the tape into the machine to see whether it survived. Do not. The deck that jammed once will jam again, because whatever perished inside it has not un-perished, and the tape has just been handled, creased or wound in by hand and needs its pack checked before it goes anywhere near a transport.

The same goes for a different machine. A tape that has just been chewed has a section of uneven winding, possibly a crease and possibly a stretched length, and a second-hand deck of unknown condition is the wrong place to find out how bad it is. If the recording is replaceable, a test play on a machine you trust is a reasonable gamble. If it is the only copy of something, it is not.

The safest thing to do with a freed tape that matters is to leave it in its case and have it played once, on a serviced deck, by someone who inspects the pack first. That single play is the transfer, and after it the recording exists as a file rather than on a length of tape that has already been through one bad day. The order of events, from the tape arriving to the files coming back, is described in what happens after you send tapes to us.

When to stop and hand it over

Some situations are past the point where a careful amateur should carry on:

• The tape is stuck in a TV and VCR combi unit and will not eject.
• Tape is wrapped tightly around the head drum and you cannot ease it off without pressing on the drum.
• The tape has snapped inside the machine and both ends are threaded.
• The tape is visibly mouldy or has left sticky residue on the mechanism.
• The cassette shell is cracked and tape is loose inside it.
• It is the only copy of something you could not bear to lose.

In any of those, the right move is to unplug the machine, leave everything exactly as it is, and get it to someone who can open it on a bench. A tape left threaded is not deteriorating by the hour; a tape being worked on by a worried person with tweezers is.

Our VHS to digital transfer service takes damaged and jammed tapes as a matter of course. Each one is inspected, the pack is checked and any loose or creased tape sorted out before it goes near a deck, and it is then played once on maintained equipment to capture what remains. If the jam happened in a VHS-C adapter rather than a full-size cassette, the problem and the fix are slightly different, and covered in what to do when a VHS-C adapter jams.

The bottom line

A tape stuck in the VCR is a tape that has not yet been damaged by you, and keeping it that way is the whole job. Stop, switch off, and do not pull. Try a clean power cycle and one press of eject. If the tape is threaded, open the lid on a standalone deck, free it by the edges with your fingers, lift the cassette clear and wind the loop back in slowly by the hub.

Then put the cassette in its case and resist the urge to test it. The machine that chewed it will do so again, and the recording has already survived one bad moment. Give it a good one next: a single play on a deck that works, and a file at the end of it. What that play involves and what comes back is in our VHS to digital guide.