If you want to read something from magnetic tape, you need a tape head, right? Or you could do like [Igor Brichkov] and make your own. It looks surprisingly simple. He used a washer with a small slot cut in it and a coil of wire.

The first experiment, in the first video below, is using a commercial tape head connected to a preamp. Music playing “through” the homemade head is readable by the commercial tape reader. This is a prelude to creating an entire tape deck using the head, which you can see in the second video below.

The homemade deck is a collection of small protoboards along with some hodgepodge components, a Bluetooth board, and aluminum foil shielding. One of the protoboards has a simple VU meter using eight LEDs.

We aren’t sure what possessed [Igor] to want to make a tape deck, and — to be fair — it looks like he borrowed the transport mechanism from a commercial player. But we never really need an excuse to build something cool, so we appreciate him sharing his DIY tape deck with us and the world.

If you want to know just about anything related to tape decks, we have some suggested reading for you. If you have trouble finding parts for your cassette collection, maybe fire up your 3D printer.