If you don’t see any screws, your cassette is the type that is glued together. Issues that you will need to take a cassette tape apart to fix include a ripped or broken tape and a tape that has come off one of the wheel hubs.
If you can’t pry the cassette case apart with your hands after separating the halves on one side, repeat the process with the screwdriver for the other sides of the cassette until you can pull them apart.
This will keep the wheel hubs in place so you don’t accidentally drop them out and cause more damage to the tape.
If you don’t have a pair of small, sharp scissors, you can carefully cut the damaged ends off using a boxcutter or utility knife and your cutting board. Depending how much damaged tape you have to cut off, there could be a noticeable skip in the audio of the tape after you splice it back together.
Make sure that the broken end of the tape is completely flat and not curling at all, so that it is easy to work with when you’re splicing the other broken end to it.
The spliced pieces will be held down on the cutting board by the cellophane tape at this point.
The sticky side of the cellophane tape and the side of the cassette’s tape that has no cellophane tape on it should now be facing upwards towards you.
This should hold the broken tape securely together and limit the chances of it coming undone in the future.
You can now put the cassette tape back together.
If you have a cassette tape that has come off one of the hubs, it is very difficult to reattach it to the same hub. Using a new wheel tape from a blank cassette that already has tape attached to it will allow you to splice the old tape to it to attach it to a new hub more easily.
This will give you a new spool with a clean-cut piece of tape to splice the tape from your old cassette to, so that it is attached to the new wheel hub.
It’s best to do this on a cutting board on a flat work surface in front of you.
See the above method for complete instructions on how to splice cassette tape together.
You can now reassemble the cassette tape.
It’s best not to glue all the way around the cassette tape, just in case you have to take it apart again in the future.
