Ambitions

The restoration has a destination. These are the projects this site is working toward, in rough order — and like everything else here, the results will be published as they happen.

Digitize Ted's tapes

The reason for all of it: a calibrated, properly aligned transfer of the reels my father recorded in 1978–1980. Everything else on this list serves this.

The schematic, redrawn

The tape transport schematic is a scan of a hand-drawn sheet. The ambition: capture it in KiCad — free, open-source, plain-text files — and publish both the KiCad source and a clean PDF/SVG next to the original. A schematic you can search, print and edit, not just squint at.

New copies of the boards

Scan each circuit board, redraw it in KiCad, and publish the design files plus fab-ready Gerbers, so a fresh board is an upload and a few dollars away for anyone whose original is beyond saving. First candidate: the P-12 speed board — small, single-sided, already photographed here. The schematic and the board files check each other — the netlist has to match — so each redraw proofreads the other.

Complete the manuals archive

Done — as of August 2026, every slot on the manuals page is filled. The sales brochures were found and scanned; the "service manual" slot turned out to be chasing a document Otari never published (the maintenance manual already is the factory's service book); and the last and rarest piece, the OIM-1005E operation manual — a book no scan of had ever surfaced online — arrived as an original paper copy through the Brisbane tape community, scanned here at 1200 dpi, and now has its own digital edition, five sections transcribed and verified against the scan. Every factory document this site set out to find is now not just held, but scanned and transcribed — the whole ambition, end to end.