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Here in Mediachance land we love to bring old vintage equipment to life. Reel-to-reels, turntables, tape decks there is more of them in our office than iPods. Most of those machines work well, except they are in need of new belts and idler tires which require a tedious search on the web for the correct dimensions. Fortunately there are still some companies selling the parts but even their own databases are often incomplete or often ridden with OCR mistakes (For example PRB’s own catalog may refer you to a non-existing part OI37.0 that you will never find where in fact it was meant to be OB7.0). It happened more than once on ebay that a belt that was supposed to fit my machine model came and it was the wrong size. And then imagine you maybe find box of belts in some forgotten surplus store but it is virtually impossible to figure out which machines they fit to because the databases are not cross-referenced. So the Stretchy Parts software was born!

This is a fast stand-alone windows software that allow you to search through thousands (60000 +) entries cross- referenced to 1700 currently available parts with PRB and EVG part numbers and measurements.

We tried to get info on as many parts as we could from different companies, their measurements and cross- reference them with available machines and models. This often required to OCR already OCR’d documents again, write a lot of smart heuristic filters because modern OCR’s are helpless for part numbers. Os,0s, Qs,Cs but also 1s and ls get easily mixed up. And of course B can as easily become 8 or I3 … and then we created various tools for web to fetch data from different source and then sort it through. Lot of it also become a manual process with search and replace, and we are talking about 60000 entries at this point cross-referenced to 1700 of parts…

• fully user editable and update-able • current database has 60000 models entries with 1700 parts including flat, round, square belts, idler tires and wheels • Easy and very fast to search • Reverse search - you have a rubber belt, but you have no idea where it is used • Improvements by users can be shared (currently the software allows you to upload your changes to the server, if this works well we will then add a way to download a new improved merged database. This has potential to grow into a serious database. • the database is saved and read in CSV format so it can be read and modified using spread-sheet like Excel or Open Office. (big time saver if you need to import thousands of entries from spread sheets) • the database can be re-purposed for internal evidence system with similar type of parts (you can dump our database and create new one with your own parts, for example if you sell belts for photo-copiers etc…) • can work as a portable application

Reverse Search: Here I entered few dimensions of a little idler tire I had on my desk and quickly got answer where this tire could be used.

The software maintains two cross- referenced databases: The models database (tape decks, turntables, reel-to-reels, etc) that points to the parts database. The parts database has all the necessary dimensions for each type of part, for example for round belt all we need is Internal circumference and the cross/section size. Other belts (like flat belt) would have also wall thickness.

While we tried to catch and fix many obvious errors with our heuristic algorithms, database of such size is never perfect and never complete. There are references to parts we couldn’t find, there may be some errors and of course there were many other devices out there that may be missing. We made the database user editable and also there is an option to upload user changes to the server. In the future (if all goes well) we will merge the user additions and then enable download and merge with your database.

Sorry, no trial version. At this moment the software is distributed only as a full version. It works for Windows 7,8,10.

Proceeds from the software will go towards our office coffee fund.