Broken 1960s Philips REEL to REEL Player - Trying to FIX

[Music] hi there my name's vince from mymatevents.com and today we're looking at a little bit of history a phillips reel to real player looks like it was owned by a christopher hughes so i believe these are from the 1960s 1970s that kind of era so i've never i've never used one before certainly haven't tried to fix one before so this is uh this is this is before my time by uh quite a few years so it was sent in by a vehicle adam he sent it in at christmas time and uh i've only just got around to having a look at it now so thanks a lot adam for sending it in he does have a youtube channel called norfolk man cave now if you're interested in things like it's it's kind of fascinating really he's got it looks like there's a huge amount of land and there's loads of old machinery on that land and in a lot of the videos he's trying to get things working that haven't been started for years so for example like an old motorhome that hasn't been started up in a couple of years you know getting it running again or for example an old tractor fixing up bits to it to get it working again so yeah norfolk man cave check that out if you have time so uh yeah this one here i believe is not working whatsoever it looks to be in a real sorry state it kind of looks to be uh well i don't know it just looks to be quite bashed up and none of these things look like they're actually doing what they should be doing so i think rather than plugging it in while it's in this state here i think maybe we should take it apart first it's obviously not working and see what's going on i don't know what's going to be wrong with these things here but in on the inside i'm almost certain it's just going to be a belt issue but uh yeah it'd be interesting if we can if big if we can get it working to see what is on this tape so let's get over to the blue map take it apart and see what's going on so a quick google search looking at pictures it looks like it's an n3304 recording realtor real player from 1966 to the early 1970s but then when i've done a bit more information looking up information it's saying that this one's also identical the el3572 then i looked on ebay and i found one that looks identical called the n4 304 stroke 15. now look in the back here there is a little thing here and let me zoom right in and it says their type that does look like n4 doesn't it n4 304 15. so yeah that's the model n4 304 15. how they vary between all the models i don't know right so let's uh first of all that looks like it's trapped in there doesn't it i'm gonna be able to take that out i've got gloves on because of the uh i can already see there's a few bits of goo on the bottom and around the place on these belts go completely messy and that mess gets everywhere annoyingly that's caught in here don't want to rip the tape how hold on does this pop out oh here we go oh careful careful excellent ah that's how you release it okay now i wonder if this has got stuff on both sides i don't know is this i don't know if this is like stereo or mono or what it is well i think we should take these off and put them somewhere safe because realistically that's probably going to be the most interesting part off the video is the tape at the end so i'm just going to put them to one side actually what does it say on here emi is it emi tape yeah it says on here miller brandon oh here we go what's this here alison chris something room not sure might be just conversations and stuff on here like family stuff all right so we've got a handle there let's have a little look around here now so we've got a counter here a very very very short club very short so i think maybe the lead got damaged at some time and uh i mean that's ridiculously short isn't it you can see all the black blue around here and it looks like it's kind of bashed up here so the screws are there are the screws there's still some screws left in here we've got something rattling about let's undo the screws and see what's happening and it looks like you can change the ac voltage coming in as well as that 240 volts at the moment let's undo these screws [Music] okay that came off easy enough i just had to pull out the handle and then it's uh it levered forward right now here we go look at this mess here so where even was the belt originally so here's the remains of it it must have gone up some massive belt so it must have gone around here around here and around this one here so is there nothing on this one no i suppose so this is the one always doing the the driving must be yeah and there's a little brush here i presume to keep the maybe to keep dust off the belt yeah it's a pretty heavy duty belt as well definitely haven't got any of them i wonder are they still available oh here's another screw that's what was wrapping in the round with some uh belt goo on it okay well what see this is the reason you have to wear gloves this stuff gets everywhere it kind of goes to oil it's horrible uh right what i'm going to do is just spend day just cleaning all this because i don't want to work on it like it is annoyingly what's this here i think that's broken down as well that i don't think that is anything to do with the belt i think that's just a lump of rubber on there but that's completely broken down so that's going to have to go uh i'm not sure how repairable this is actually going to be but anyway let's start by giving a clean up are these things oh these things are working fast forward and stuff fast forward and rewind is not working but maybe that's just because of all of this stuck together here that's probably why isn't it look at that well i'm gonna get some wet wipes and start with the cleaning i'll just fast forward through the whole thing right where possible i'm going to scrape it away rather than wipe it because by wiping all i'm doing is spreading the mess everywhere so if you have a look here you see i can scrape that it's easy to clean my screwdriver afterwards so while i've got this unenviable job of scraping off all this goo which is only probably slightly better than doing a recap on a sega game gear i'm going to give a shout out to the my mate vince massive and this month the sponsors of these videos are operational 117 kitdigital.com kip hakes max rokatansky having fun repairs ellensburg amplifier repair and service will mcavis chris seal the my mate vince fan club dorian from hoover lux restorations mediasteamer.com rob hughes and felipe at mrkeebs.com you so much guys see funnily enough look fast forward and rewind are still not staying down so i don't know is it when something goes into it i can't see how putting the i putting the things on here would suddenly make that work but i'm not sure let's have a look underneath it oh we've got loads of tubes under here as well so i suppose this is just the age then before transistors where uh where it was like tube radios and stuff so would that be the same as here then well they're all soldered in there i can't actually take that out so that's the massive uh wheel that's two oh here's the motor up here this is the motor okay hmm interesting so look we have let's see if i can zoom in on this i'm just going to take my gloves off for the time bait do you have a look at the oops i don't want to break anything yeah i definitely want to break these tubes together because they're glass right if we have a look here uh i noticed that there was a little screw just just here and i thought it's undone but i don't think it is i think that might be how you adjust the play in it here because when i spin this it's not going to come across in the camera but yeah it's spinning under here and when i pull it out it's hitting against that screw so i wonder is that to adjust for a bit of play in here maybe so where does the power go into because the lead is very short so it goes in it goes in around here here to here it's a shame i can't easily take it apart it's just going to involve quite a bit of work or unsold in the wires and stuff so uh i think what i'm going to do is going to be a bit awkward i think i'm just going to reach in and clean what i can with a wet wipe and i think i'm going to use some ipa on the actual circuit boards themselves because they're pretty they're pretty dirty as they are at the moment oh look we have a tiny little schematic here unfortunately it's got a big bit of tape over it so if i peel that off it's going to rip isn't it now look at this amazingly this rubber belt here has survived so you know on this one here this is for the counter so when i spin this you can see that the counter spinning i think what i'm going to do is let's now plug it in and see if it's going to if it's going to do anything it doesn't look like there's anything uh overly burnt up on the inside or anything like that so i'm thinking it might be okay to plug in so i've got it to sit down nicely again basically uh this thing coming down here was just fouling against this bottom arm here but when i press this in here i don't know what it did originally but it doesn't seem to change between manual and automatic it does but it doesn't stay you know so it's automatic still automatic anyway let's uh let's plug it in and see what it does i believe this is the on and off switch down here and also the volume so here goes i'm going to plug it in now obviously i'm keeping my hands well away from the inside of it all right plugged in and i'm going to turn it on oh there we go that's spinning thing is why would that be spinning surely it would only spin when you press play here no maybe not what i'm gonna do is now i haven't got a belt for it and i don't know if the belts still exist i presume they probably do somewhere uh i'm going to see if i've got an elastic band just to see if we can get some kind of movement on things because i don't want to fork out for belts if there's going to be something on the inside that can't be fixed so uh for example you know the speakers and stuff might not work and some that might stretch around i've got larger ones here that uh might do the job not too sure remember this is only to test so i'm just maneuvering the elastic band into position by undoing the screws underneath the tape head and just working the elastic band in there it's not the correct way because the wires are in the way but at least it will show me whether or not these main real wheels are going to turn or not i can't see how that's going to turn that wheel there because the uh it doesn't seem to go far enough to allow it to go around here this bit here doesn't really make any sense do you know what then i'm going to put it back in and hopefully we can uh we can see what it's doing it might set it might become clear all right let's turn it on now and see what it does all right so that's all turning there but that's not obviously going to turn that and that is it i'm interesting that's turning there but we need this to be taken up don't we don't understand our pause works is it just the the rubber bung that was on the end of this putting pressure on that is that how pause works oh we have got sound on the speaker right okay oh that's manual automatic right well it's definitely doing something let's uh unplug it again so now we just have to work out this bit here don't we let's protect forget about this topic because that's not really doing anything i think that's just like a working like a clutch so that's going to be down on here but to me that's too high up that's too high up for this to grip on unless look we have our hold on there shouldn't be two belts on here should they're top and bottom i'm going to look online see if there's any sort of service manual or anything because i'm just completely i haven't got a clue what's happening here there's no way that one at that height can be anything to do with this belt at the bottom as far as i can see so i'm wondering whether or not when this is on here whether or not there's another belt that goes from this bit onto this top bit here so i've had a look online and yet this is down as an n4 304 so i'm pretty certain about that now i did watch a youtube video it was only a couple of minutes long just showing the features of it and definitely fast forward and rewind do hold down so that's not right as far as belts are concerned as far as i can see there's only one seller on ebay selling them it's from italy it's 15 pound for the belts and five pound postage i think there was four belts in the pack but i think there's four belts because on other models similar to this they need four belts while on this one i think it needs three belts the big belt here and these are supposed to be square belts i think and then it looks like i haven't seen any video on it but there's two other belts so one of them is going to be for this one here that's called a figure of eight one and uh yeah so that's one belt there two belts here and the three belts here i presume the fourth belt is for a different model doing something else this thing here is confusing me this uh this this thing but i presume once we put this on here i mean that must be some kind of clutch that must allow slippage with that felt pad there but maybe that felt pad that did seem to be some residue so i'm thinking that that felt pad should be glued because you can see this stains around here so and also there's stains here so i think that should be glued onto there like so uh now i'm not sure i don't really know what's happening there i mean there's black goo everywhere but i don't know whether there should have been anything on here on the uh on the inside originally i mean why why have we got these things here i mean why have we got those little bits there do you know what i mean so does something have to go in here possibly right first of all i want to work out what's happening with this first forward thing and rewinding because they should be working so when we press this this whole thing wants to move over but it's not moving over why is it not moving over so one wants to put it that way there and this records not doing anything is it [Music] right so why is that not so that's not pushing that up okay so that's that lever here this lever all right let's try that on the opposite side of that thing there because maybe when i lifted this up and put it back down i put it on the wrong side that's on that side there now it's still going to sit in here and i believe this was the last tube model that phillips did on reel to reel so that's quite nice [Music] yes excellent that's working so that was just the wrong side there brilliant i remember i said about this earlier not changing well look it doesn't change but when you press down record now it does change brilliant well that is it's definitely doing what it needs to do now let's plug it back in and see whether it can fast forward or rewind i'm going to turn it on so that's doing that let's press play okay now rewind is that going the opposite way yes it is there yeah that's just spinning moving that so now fast forward how would that work oh that just must go oh of course now that's going to go along here hold on and that's going to fast forward that yes fantastic we're getting there right now what i'm going to do is turn it off i am going to get a belt and wrap it around there and see if there see if now this takes up when we press play i'm just thinking the elastic bands i've got are thicker than the walkman belt so i'm just going to try with an elastic band to begin with just got one wrapped around here you see [Music] now that elastic band is about to break i just want to quickly see whether it's going to do anything different now whether that's going to start spinning [Music] ping okay that one broke but uh yeah this one's spinning it's not going to have any strength to it is it yeah so i need to sort of work out how that clutch thing works so i just typed philips n4304 clutch into google and look at the picture over here so that's that inside wheel and that's the reason why there's all black on the inside as well black goo because that rubber there has completely broken down so that's what it should look like and they just clip onto these bits here you see so i'm going to have to do some kind of rubber insert there to put pressure on the other one try to mimic something like that now check this out i just put reel to reel clutch rubbers and look at that now that's interesting so that's on uk vintage radio repair restoration discussion forum i know it's for a different model number but maybe that would work and i have got a pack of o-rings i'm going to give it a go so i'm just working on the clutch and this is an o-ring kit that i bought from i think it was screw fix here in the uk so it's got all different sizes now i am going to go with this size here 22 mil by two millimeter now they look like they're way too big but i think that might be a good thing because look if i put one in that little bit there and one in that bit there so it kind of looks like a weird looking sort of shamrocky type thing then once it goes into here and i kind of crush in the edges i think by crushing the edges here it's going to put pressure it's going to kind of fill it up like so and i think the pressure on these bits here might act the same sort of way as the fingers sticking out that's what i'm thinking so it's going to be like that there and i'm thinking then when i turn that it will still allow this to spin the wrong way but it's going to be acting more like a clutch which i presume is how it's supposed to act right so that's that bit there i don't know if it's going to work or not we won't know until we put it back together also the speed and everything is going to be out on this because i'm just using a huge massive rubber band here and i presume that's not going to be calibrated i presume that the measurements between here and here have to be very similar to whatever the measurements are around here i'm kind of thinking so this is probably going to be all over the place but what we'll do is i want to just get it back together and then i want to give the outside a nice clean so it looks nice on the outside and then i just want to play it just to see if there's anything recognizable coming out of that tape whatsoever so now i am going to glue this to here just going to try a little bit this hot glue if this doesn't work i'll see if i've got any fabric glue let's plug it in and see what it does now [Music] still not very strong i can stop it very easily well i'm going to put the cover back on and see if it's uh maybe it's designed to be stopped easy it's pretty strong like that but that's because it's against there i think that's going to be too weak also what i've done is i've just put a i've doubled up a rubber o-ring on this bit here as well because it was a huge lump of rubber there earlier again i don't think that's going to be big enough but we'll give it a go now originally you can see there would have been a lot of grease all around these areas here so i'm just going to put the grease back in that this is a molecule e m em30l so [Music] so three in one oil i'm gonna drop it down into this area in here just where this is spinning also what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna get a nice clean cotton bud a q-tip and i'm just gonna wipe it on the head the the head up here you know i'm going to undo that circlip that thing should only touch here when there when the when it's in play there we go should be that side there i'm sure like that so now i'm going to get a clean q-tip a cotton bud and i'm going to clean up the head and also the erase head here and also i've already cleaned up this roller a lot but i'm going to clean it with ipa as well because it has kind of got a it looks rusty but it doesn't seem to be cleaning any more than that so just using this isopropyl alcohol which is 99.9 percent look at the dirt on that oh it's filthy i've never seen a tape head so dirty so it might not even read the tape even if i get the mechanism working maybe this won't even read it a fair play the ipa is removing that rust-like material look at it wow i'm really happy with how that's come up it's completely different than before so now i'm going to thoroughly clean the inside of the case the outside of the case all the buttons in the speaker grilles and everything like that and try to make this presentable and then we'll put the reels on it at the very end and let's see if any sound can come out of this whatsoever so here it is look at it it's come up really really nice considering what it looked like to begin with it's a couple of days later now and i've been just trying to understand this and learn a little bit about it and i feel like i know a lot more now than i did at the beginning of the video look at this little carry handle portable i've ended up really enjoying this thing here and to begin with i didn't really like the look of it but now it's really grown on me and there's something that's really styling about it especially when it's got the cover on here on this one it looks like you can play it with the cover on but for the purpose of the video let's take it off this little button here that you press to undo that cover there the thing that threw me originally when i was testing this out was that it was spooled up wrong so basically this tape was coming down here and then going through to here so it would play okay but every time i went to rewind it would just throw a load of tape out on the floor so basically with a realtor real machine the tape needs to come round here past here and back through this way so that's the way it needs to go it needs to go on the outsides so around here through there and up here yeah and when it comes to rewinding this one actually goes clockwise and this one anti-clockwise counterclockwise when you're playing and fast forwarding so it seems to be a little bit different than what you would think and that's the reason why you have the tape going on the outside there other things worthy of no are if i plug it in i want to show you this this is called a magic eye this is basically like you know when you do your recording and you don't want the needle to go into the red because it can get a bit distorted well this is what this is you don't want the outer two ones to move up into the red so if we plug it in here there should be a little cover for the back here that's missing so believe it or not it is actually working okay i think it might be playing a tiny bit slow it's hard for me to tell because i haven't got any music and i don't know what the people sound like in real life but i'm thinking it has to be a little bit out because i've just used elastic bands on the inside but now i know it's working from what i can see perfectly i will pay the 20 pound and get the belt sent over from italy because now i know what i'm doing it's going to take about 20 minutes just to fit them so it's not a not a massive job i've also got the paws working what i had to do is the bit that was sticking out and i had the o-ring on i added a bigger o-ring to it i put a bit of hot glue down onto the o-ring to stop it springing off and now that puts pressure in fact you can see it moving here all it's doing is putting pressure on that reel there to stop it turning so anyway let's uh let's turn it on so you turn it on here and this is the volume i believe this is bass and treble it definitely sounds nicer when it's over this way here i haven't tested the record as far as plugging in the microphone because i think the microphone goes into this one here and this is i believe for an external speaker but when i press record and play it does then blank out that section of the tape so it's definitely a raisin to tape so i've got a feeling it probably is going to record just fine as well anyway look at this here i'm going to turn that off and turn it back on again so this is like a valve in here like a tube and when we turn it on can you see the way it moved there yeah it takes a while to warm up now because it's already warmed up it will just kick in straight away but you see there's nothing there now turn it on and look at the way that's moving and apparently that's supposed to move in and out when you're doing the recordings that's nice and that works similar to a crt tv so that's like a little screen in there if you imagine like a crt and these are the kind of like moving images here really very very nice indeed it's a very long tape one side of it is just a bbc two recording from back in the day and uh on the other side it's slightly more interesting but me and adam are not going to make our millions on it there's no hidden beatles songs or anything like that it's just a family so there's some sort of christmas stuff on there kids singing nursery rhymes uh a mum or a grandma singing a bethlehem hymn uh also there is at the beginning it's quite interesting there's two organ songs played on the organ one is killing me softly which i didn't even realize was that old and another one i think is called all of me and then she goes on to sing those songs and she thanks the person for lending her this explains she's got a bit of a cold i'll play you a little bit of that because that's a slight bit interesting but that's it really it's just kind of normal family stuff as you would expect on this but it is working perfectly so if you look at the counter here you can see it's 998 i've got it set near zero because that's where i'm going to be playing it from but if i rewind it you can see now nice and smooth and can you see it's counting backwards yeah stop it here fast forward again nice and smooth and counting forward if i stop and play here it's going to be an organ [Music] so i think that's all of you or all of me i'm not sure and if i pause it you can see it does pause [Music] let's fast forward it until we get to zero and you can hear us speaking here we go turning the music and all this sort of thing social now another time but anyway thanks for the loan of the machine i've really enjoyed playing with it this evening and um it's nice to record a little message for you this way as we're not on the phone and i do hope to see you again soon i hope to get tony to drop this in for you so that you'll have it by the weekend and um i do hope that i don't sound like this incidentally all the time because when i play this back i sound just like a suffolk swede so i do hope a suffolk swede i have never heard that uh i've never heard that saying before but i quite like it a suffolk swede and then she goes on to sing a little bit of killing me softly so if i fast forward [Music] it and it sounds like there's birds chirping in the background [Music] so there we have it massive thumbs up to adam for sending it out to me it's not something i would have ever picked to look at but from knowing nothing about them i feel now that i have actually gained a little bit of knowledge and yeah it makes a lot more sense to me how they work how to spool them up and stuff like that the nicest thing for me has been this little magic eye down here i think that's lovely and i've never owned anything with valves before or tubes inside it to my knowledge anyway so it's quite nice to hear to hear what they sound like so uh yeah massive thanks adam thanks everybody who watched this video and thanks to the lady that gave me some content for this 40 or 50 years ago take care bye now oh i don't know what to say i'll be a funny old lady sorry [Music] together in again manger no creep for a bed the little lord jesus lay down his this is radio 2 on 1500 meters in vhf it's half past 11 and that's time for tony brandon [Music] you

Channel: My Mate VINCE

Views: 72,660

Keywords: faulty philips reel to reel player, Philips N4304/15, repairing a reel to reel player, changing the belts on a reel to reel player, reel to reel recorder restoration, reel to reel tape player, repair and restoration, fault finding and repair

Id: OrHXdC4OoOM

Length: 38min 50sec (2330 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021