Frank Schmidt, Member of the Original 8-Track Tape Design Team

Lear Jet 8-track PlayerThe Man Who Invented “Kerchunk”!

Mr. Frank Schmidt was a member of the original design team that developed the 8-track tape at the Lear Jet Company in the early 1960’s. I ran into Frank on the 8-track Heaven web site, and he graciously consented to an interview. It was fascinating to talk with one of the engineers of our sacred 8-track tape! Frank has an excellent memory for details, something we’re all hungry for when it comes to 8-track lore. Today, Frank lives right outside Wichita, KS, not far from the birthplace of the 8-track tape itself.

(Phone interview with Frank Schmidt conducted in May 1999 by Malcolm Riviera):

Malcolm: So you were involved in the design team for the 8-track tape from July 1964 until late 1966?

Frank: I was originally working with the aircraft group at Lear, and when they re-organized the stereo group, they asked me if I wanted to go to it, so I said yes. At that time, the existing design group had given up on the first version of the machine, which was a 4-track machine. At that time, there was no Lear Stereo, it was Lear Aircraft. Bill Lear had put his plant in Wichita, which is the air capitol of the world. The primary thing was building the Lear Jet, which was a revolutionary concept, a private jet. I remember that Bill was always interested in automotive sound – that goes back to Motorola. He was the father and founder of Motorola, and the car radio.

The machine was designed in a very conventional manner like Delco radios of the day: sheet metal type wraparound case with everything sandwiched in. It used a 12-volt motor with flywheel. It was belt driven to the captain… it just didn’t work, too much wow and flutter and problem with speed control. It had a lot of problems.

So we started on a new design with an integral (direct drive) motor, with the motor and capstan as one unit. So that’s what the Lear Stereos had in them. We called them the “pancake” motor, because it was 4.7 inches in dia. and 1.3 inches thick. It weighed about 3 lb. and was the fly wheel for the drive capstan.

So they were not belt driven?

Absolutely not. Later on, the technology and the electronics caught up so you could make a decent speed control and get away with the belt. You have to remember that it was 1964! Technology was not all that great at the time. The motor we used was a direct-drive motor… a very revolutionary direct drive motor. That’s one of the key reasons that that sucker was so darn good.

What ever happened to those prototypes?

I have two of them here! They used basically a 12-volt motor built backwards. In a conventional motor, the armature rotated and the field was stationary. In Bill’s motor, the field rotated and the armature was still. Our group developed this thing, along with the first players.

About 75% of my time, though, was spent developing the cartridge.

Ford Demo 8-Track TapeSo how did you go about re-designing the Muntz cartridge?

Well, when I got there, one of the things Bill was intrigued with was the Muntz system. One of the things of course was to adapt it into an automobile. The Muntz stuff had a lot of problems when you got it into an automobile. That was, I believe, one of the downfalls of the 8-track. It was a system that just did not lend itself to the environment that you find in an automobile.

Which is what it was originally designed for!

Yes, it was originally put into automobiles; there was consideration for putting the players elsewhere. Bill’s focus was always on auto sound, vis a vis the Motorola radio. That was his primary concern: automotive and the aircraft.

There was also a monaural system that was around, an endless loop system on a great big cartridge used in stores for announcements and so forth. The endless loop system wasn’t really anything new… a lot of this stuff was out there, it was just a matter of putting it together.

Putting it together and marketing it.

Yes. He was a marketer. Bill was a marketing genius… and a fundraiser.

The original concept was going before I got there, which was to use basically the four track system. He was interested in getting around the patent that Muntz had. And that’s where the pinch roller came. All the early development was done using the Muntz cartridges – we machined them and modified them and added a roller to them. We had dozens of Muntz decks and hundreds of cartridges – I remember they had gray bottoms and clear plastic tops. All our development work was done with those.

So how did he pull that off, taking the Muntz design and changing it, and getting a new patent?

(Laughs) That was one of the things Bill was good at! He didn’t believe too much in patents. I remember a discussion once where he said “Find a way to design around it, or we’ll go ahead and do it and fight it out in court later.”

When he first started with the idea that we would go to 8 tracks on a ¼” tape, everyone told him it was crazy, can’t be done. We went with Nortronics and built the first tape. They said it was crazy, too! For the tape, we used Scotch. They had quite a few developments, including graphite-coated tapes. As far as I know, they are the only ones that made tape that was worth a damn!

Lear Jet Stereo 8The tape used in 8-track cartridges was different than reel-to-reel tape…

Oh, absolutely. You have to have graphite coating on the back side of the tape. Because you have to remember, on an endless loop 8-track, you’re pulling tape off the center of the platform hub, and you’re adding it to the outside of the platform hub, and you’ve got a speed difference. That roll of tape has to be loose because it’s constantly sliding against itself. You lose a lot of that lubricant over a period of time. That’s that black dust you get inside the tapes.

Another thing that happened was with the binder that binds the graphite to the back of the mylar tape. It starts to give out with age. There’s nothing you can do about it. If you play that tape over and over, that tape is going to wear out… it’s going to give up its lubricant and bind up tight. That’s one of the limitations of the 8-track system.

The other thing that aggravates it in car usage is temperature… it can be 120º inside a car in the summer and 5º below in the winter. The one thing we were working on, but never got around to, was the problem of the contact of the capstan and pinch roller under those circumstances. You cannot leave the cartridge shoved in the deck! It causes flat spots on the pinch roller. In the summertime, it actually adheres the tape to the pinch roller, so it glues itself together. When you start it up, it wraps itself around the capstan.

There’s another problem that 8-track hobbyists face: the melted pinch roller from some of the early carts.

Yeah, I worked like crazy on that! I worked through about 30 or 40 different rubber and elastic compounds, looking for the perfect material that wouldn’t flat spot in cold temperature and wouldn’t adhere to them in hot weather conditions. The one thing I wasn’t looking for was a 30- year lifespan on the cartridges! (laughs) You have to look at the materials that were available at that time. Very limited. Those rollers would barely last 5 years.

Lear Jet 8-track PlayerI understand that the early tapes were mainly purchased at car dealerships since they were being marketed for automobiles.

Well, Ford, GM and Sears were the first to offer it. Everyone had demo tapes, because you had to demonstrate the system. And that brings up another point – I don’t know why it gets badmouthed as being bad audio. It wasn’t. It was terrific! It was like nothing that had ever existed. We actually brought the best of the LP home stereo system to an automobile! Nobody had ever done it.

Up until then you really only had AM radio for your car… the 8-track allowed you to choose your music for the first time.

You had AM and FM… FM multiplex was just starting to come out.

But there wasn’t much programming on FM at that time.

Right… another thing people don’t remember was the reverberation units. The factory guys were putting them in… I remember in Detroit driving a brand new Cadillac convertible with one.

But also you have to remember that the lowest quality equipment you have today is ten times better than the best we had back then. We had good audio recording… we tried to put the best amplifier that we could within price limitations…. but where we fell down was with the speakers. You could get terrific sound but you had to have a speaker cabinet back then to get good sound. The small speakers were miserable! The cones were no good, the magnets were no good, the audio sucked… and then you had to put it in a car!

I think we were the first people to put speakers in the door panels. You have to remember too that the cars were miserable… water leaked into the door panel. We used to stick the speaker into a bread wrapper, glue it around the back, and cut it out around the speaker. It gave a little bit of protection for all that water that came into the door panel when it rained.

It’s well known that the first 8-track players were car decks that came out in the Fords in the fall of 1965. Can you tell me about those?

There were four basic units that Lear made in the beginning: two under-dash units and two in-dash units. The under-dash units used a U-shaped metal bracket to hand the player under the dash, or reverse the bracket and mount on the hub. These two models were either just straight 8-track players, or a combination 8-track and A.M. radio (pictured). Then there were two identical models that were for in-dash mounting.

How did the Ford connection come about?

Lear was very tight with Henry Clay Ford. I remember when they brought Ford’s personal black Lincoln to the plant in a semi. They shipped it down from Detroit. We took into our model shop and proceeded to completely remove the entire dash. I remember it had a beautiful dash: die-cast aluminum with striping. We put it on a milling machine and cut the openings for one of our players for a custom-mounting unit. We ended up breaking the casting, so we had to order another one from our local Ford dealer. We ended up breaking 3 of them before we got one that worked. But it was a really neat installation.

So that was basically the first 8-track installation?

Yes, other than some that he put in airplanes. He put some in Learjets and one in the Learstar, which was a big twin-engine plane he used for business travel.

Another one of the interesting car installations was in 1965. We showed up at work and everyone was gathered around a car… it was Elvis Presley’s gold Cadillac from RCA Records. We put two 8-track players in it and about eight speakers.

Why two players?

I don’t know. That’s what they wanted. It was a beautiful car. Everything on it was gold plated.

When the first 8-track players were starting to hit the public in the ’65 Fords, do you remember a lot of fanfare? Was it considered a great triumph? Were people really excited at the company?

We were all glad to see the product in production. There was no real great triumph at the time as we were too busy on the next product the 110 v home machine in a wooden cabinet.

What about the tapes? Where were they made?

We had our own audio laboratory. We basically took it off of LP records and made a master tape. Our audio engineer, a German lady named Krista, had two little slave decks where she could make duplicates. She made all the cartridges there. And of course to begin with we used the cobbled-up Muntz cartridges. Later on when we got into the design of the Lear cartridge, and started getting the pieces together, we got a custom molder to make our first prototype. We would mold parts, try them out, make modifications, and try it again, and so on. Trying to solve one problem after another. One of the big problems we had was tracking; another was getting them to rotate freely. Developing that bottom shelf, which helped the tracking a lot.

Something I’ve always been fascinated with is the mechanism that moves the head down to the next piece of tape at the end of a track…

You like that? I invented that thing. The entire ramp and drop mechanism. Somewhere there’s a patent for that with my name on it. Bill’s, Sam’s [Auld], and mine. It was, of course, all turned over to the Lear company. I am not sure where the idea come from originally, might have been one of Bill’s. It was a round disc that had stars on the out side diameter. A solenoid which was activated by the aluminum tape passing over a switch or if you pushed the track button, would rotate the disc 45 degrees. There is a little stair step circular ramp around the top of the disc for 180 degrees then it repeats. Each step is the distance between a track on the tape. You lift the head which is in a holder and spring loaded to remain in contact with the ramp, after 4 clicks you are on the top step. The order of play starting at the bottom of the tape is 1-5; 2-6; 3-7; 4-8 these are the 8 tracks or 4 stereo channels. When you finish the 4-8 tracks the head is dropped to the bottom of the ramp and you start over again. After 8 clicks the head cam has rotated one full turn.

Yes, we were all told we were crazy to move the head, but it was easier than moving the tape. At this time an 8-track play head was thought to be impossible as to the cost involved. Record heads were very expensive and custom made, but as progress marched on the record feature was available to the consumer. I got it to work and designed the head holder and the ramp disc. I remember the first solenoids came from a Radio Shack store.

People always say “why do they call it 8-track anyway”? And I enjoy telling them how it’s really 8 individual audio tracks lined up parallel to each other.

If you ever want to see the tracks, take a piece of 8-track tape about 4 inches long and dust it with some really fine ferrous oxide powder. Very carefully blow it off, but not too much. Then take a piece of Scotch tape and press it down and peel the tape off slowly. What you’ll have left on there are all the tracks. We used to do that and look at them under a microscope to look at the track separation.

What did you do in the years after you left the Lear Company?

I ended up leaving Detroit. One of the guys on the team, an electronics technician named Vic, had left a few months earlier and started a company called RAEL. I went to work with him. We did tape duplication. We had about 15 Ampex slave decks and a master. What we would do is get music, usually from RCA, remaster it down to an 8-track, you know, because you have to lay the tapes out so that nothing comes on the splice… you have to work around the splice so that the splice is a blank spot. We would then make the tape. I remember that the first one we made was “Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass.” To this day I cannot listen to that music (laughs).

Lear Jet Stereo 8-track Tape PlayerSo that involved the art of fitting the music into four equal lengths of time. Which brings me to my question about the infamous “fade out,” which is what people always remember the 8-track tape for. You’re grooving along to your song and all the sudden it starts fading out – kerchunk –- then it fades back up.

If you really weren’t too good at it, they’d fade it out before it hit the splice joint then fade it back up. If you were really good at it, you would re-edit the thing so you didn’t fade it out; it started and stopped around the splice.

You had to rearrange the songs…

Yes, you had to re-arrange the music. That’s the correct way of doing it.

I know that some collectors have made note of famous albums that have the tracks rearranged. A particularly famous one is the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper’s” album where they throw an extra chorus on a song to extend the track a little.

Oh yeah. A lot of stuff like that was done. Another problem we had was that we used to get a 1″ master reel-to-reel from RCA, but our master machine was ½”, so we had to get a ½” copy made. So where do find this kind of professional equipment in Detroit? You have to remember that this was the 60’s, and there wasn’t a lot of equipment like this around. Dick finally found a place downtown… only problem was that we had to do it late at night, usually after midnight. We would rent some time on their studio equipment because they weren’t using it then. It was an outfit called Motown Records. It was just a hole in the wall, upstairs on the third floor…. it was nothing! But at least they had the equipment, and they were kind enough to rent it to us late at night. I remember going down there lots of times and sitting around waiting while they were finishing up a session. There were some black gals singing… they were called The Supremes. We used to sit around and talk with Berry Gordy [founder of Motown] all the time.

You mentioned something earlier about how the type face for the Lear Jet Stereo logo came to be …

Oh, yeah. We were using that kind of raised lettering on the cartridge. Well, we would see Bill [Lear] about 2-3 times a week… he’d wander in. Of course his right hand man was Sam Auld. Sam was saying “hey, we need to come up with a logo for Lear Stereo.” Back then it wasn’t computerized, so we out to some supply places and bought 20 or 30 different type faces using these rub-on letters, and wrote out “Lear Stereo, Inc.” in different fonts. Lear never liked any of them (laughs)! So I said “Sorry Bill, tell me what you want!” It never looked good enough. I remember one afternoon he was flying in from Wichita, and he rented a car. He came walking in to the engineering department and he was carrying a door off the glove box from the Pontiac he had rented! He threw the door down and said “this is the font I want! This is the style I want!” He had just ripped the door right out of the rental car. Later on they put it in that stylized oval, but that’s where the style came from him.

William LearWhat was Lear like?

He was a weird character. One of the first things we had to do when we set up our plant in Detroit was remove all the clocks out of the building. The Lear factory, office, plant, whatever, never had a clock in it. It was like a gambling casino… he didn’t want you to know what time it was.

Another thing was that Lear never slept! You would see him wandering around the plant at 3 in the morning. He operated by taking naps, maybe 4 or 5 naps in a 24-hour period. He would take 20-40 minute naps, then he’d be up and going again. His office was right off the engineering department, and the only thing in that office was a couch. Wherever he went in his company there were couches like that. He’d go in there, shut the door, lay down, take a little nap. That’s the way he lived. His bodyguard would stand right outside the door.

We had a weird place in Wichita, too. It was the only aircraft plant I ever worked in that had a barbershop. Bill felt that your hair grew on company time, so it should be cut on company time! (laughs) You could call down there, get an appointment, and get a hell of a nice haircut. The other thing we had was a kitchen. It was a walled-in area right in the middle of the building. You could go in there 24 hours a day and you’d find a nice big kitchen with 4-5 tables, and everything you’d find in a kitchen: stove, sink, refrigerator, freezer, oven, the whole works. Completely stocked. Dishes, food, anything you’d want. It was all free.

After we got all the problems solved, got the thing up and running, Bill lost interest in the 8-track. He was off on something else. As soon as it was no longer a challenge, he would lose interest in it. From there he got into the steam cars out in Nevada, using “Learium,” the magic thermal conversion fluid for the Lear Steam Car (laughs). The final thing he got into right before he died was “The Pusher,” a Canard-type of aircraft. It was supposed to be most high performance, fuel-efficient aircraft around. He thought he could do the Learjet all over again. That’s when Sam and Moya got together, and there were a lot of bitter feelings about that. That’s what her book (Bill and Me) is about.

So his concept was just to live there at the company, a self-contained little city, no need to leave!

That’s the way he operated, and he expected his people to do the same. I remember one time we worked 36 hours straight. We slept on desks. Plus we ran on a shoestring budget. I took two pay reductions because there wasn’t enough money to pay everyone. We used to have joke there that when the paychecks would arrive, everybody’d leave and get them cashed while they were still good!

I remember once I called up Goodyear in Akron, Ohio. I was inquiring about a new rubber compound that they’d come up with. I told them that I was Frank Schmidt from Lear Jet, and then there was a big silence. Then the guy went ballistic! “You S.O.B.! When are you going to pay for those 56 tires!” It turned out that we’d stiffed him on a bunch of tires for the jets!

You’ve talked about having some lean times at Lear, but once the 8-track took off and was successful, did your division get profitable? Was it considered successful?

I don’t know. I don’t think that most of the money was never made in the machines, but in the rights. We developed all the standards, so anyone who wanted to make tapes or players had to buy our license. It was a gold mine.

When the first tapes came out, were they only on RCA?

Yes, to start with, because we worked with RCA in Indianapolis. I delivered thousands of cartridge parts to them. I spent a lot of time at their recording facilities.

So eventually all the record labels wanted in on it?

That’s right. That’s where you get the proliferation of different 8-track cartridge design.

Well, among 8-track hobbyists, there’s a lot of discussion on how to open various cartridge designs. Some of them look like they were never designed to be opened!

That’s right. The original design had pins to lock it together. Later on we added those little tabs so you could separate the top and bottom. Otherwise you’d end up destroying them.

Lear Jet 8-track Player AdYou basically have to drill out the pins.

That’s right. You have to realize that at the time it was a commercial consumer product; we didn’t see any long life on a cartridge. We tried to make it as best we could, as attractive as we could and as simple as we could. We figured they would have the same life an LP record.

Frank, in your opinion, was the 8-track far more sucessful than you imagined than it would be?

I loved that product and I will always feel it got short changed. If we had been 5 years earlier it would have made it big. The Phillips work on the 1/8 inch. tape cassettes made for a lot simpler transport system, which was cheaper to build and more compact in design. We just were at the wrong time, the electronics revolution, miniature parts, first simple chips, that’s what
did it in. In a couple of short years it was history. Yes, we got screwed.

What fried me was the issue of Time several months ago that listed the 100 worse ideas in the last 100 years. The 8-track tape was number 20 I think!

There are a surprisingly large number of people that are into 8-tracks nowadays.

I gathered that from your web site and from eBay.

Well, around 10 years ago I don’t thing anyone would have dreamed that there would be any interest in them again.

It’s gotten me to that point where I’m interested again! I have one of the first production units that’s never been installed. I’m thinking about putting it in my Toyota.

Frank, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I’ve really enjoyed this.

Well, it was an interesting part of my life. I was there for 3 ½ years. My contemporaries today kind of take it out on me, they’ll announce that I’m one of the founders of the 8-track stereo! I’ll tell you one thing; I’d do it all over again.

 

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