Removing all the flaking and corrosion has revealed that the drum is in WAY worse shape than it looked.
Believe me, part of me DID die as I was doing this. It's bad, mind you it's not like we are any worse off.
The only thing that ca save it now is a good resurfacing of the tape path. Emery paper and the polishing tools I need are on order. While a lot of that nastyness is the thickness of the old plating I'll be keeping an eye on how much material we remove in case we run into a head clearance problem later. There is an adjustment for that but I'm not gonna touch that right now.