Great John,
Anyone that comes up with the nuts and bolts for stuff like this, please try and document it and post it in an appropriately titled thread. This way it'll be easy to find with a simple search and won't get buried. No reason for folks to have to reinvent the wheel over and over.
This sort of lends itself to what I believe was one of Doc's ideas for this forum. To have current info pertaining to use of reel to reels. There's stuff all over the web on reel to reel but no central location. I don't know how many times I've gone back to find an old post that I've made here just to find the address of a link I've offered.
For anyone who hasn't already seen it, there are a couple of stickies above the General forum. One is a beginners guide (which is meant to pick up where your owners manuals leave off) and a Reel to Reel links thread. And although I'd like to keep the beginners guide as clean as possible to lend a more textbook feel to it, I feel like the links thread really should be seeing more posts added to it on a regular basis. Of course, I'm probably the number one offender in forgetting to post great links but "do as I say,..".