Pencil + cassette
Winding a cassette with a pencil meant pushing a pencil into the reel's hole and turning the tape by hand, the old fix for slack or tangled tape.
Era: 90s
What it was like
A six-sided pencil fitted the reel's teeth just right. When the player chewed the tape, you wound it back in slowly.
Rewinding on a battery cassette player drained the batteries, so many people used a pencil instead.
Questions
- Why wind a cassette with a pencil?
- It fixed slack or chewed tape by hand, and saved batteries when rewinding.