Rewinding An Audio Cassette Using A Bic Pen
| Field | Music |
| Went Obsolete | Early 2000s |
| Made Obsolete By | MP3? Players, Compact Discs |
| Knowledge Assumed | Hand cranking, steady hand, loose wrist |
| When useful | When your ancient cassette player breaks down and you need to rewind a tape |
Cassette tapes featured a certain length of magnetic tape between two tape spools which, on playback, was transferred from one tape hub to another. Cassette tape recorders always featured fast forward and rewind buttons, which put either of both hubs on high speed mode depending on the desired action.
Sometimes, however, these functions were too slow performing (specially on personal cassette players) or you needed to rewind several tapes at once. This is where manual rewinding using a Bic pen (made by french company Bic) came in.
Bic pens feature a hexagonal shape that fits the spool gears of a cassette tape perfectly. By inserting the Bic pen into one of the hubs and rotating the pen counterclockwise (right spool) or clockwise (left spool) continously, the tape could be advanced or rewound manually. Some manually dextered people would grab the pen and the cassette, and rewind it making fast and continous circular movements with the hand, as if manipulating a party noisemaker. This approach could sometimes be faster than built-in machine rewinding. Another way to wind the tape was to grip only the pen and spin the cassette around it rapidly.