Panasonic VHS Tape Path Alignment

hey guys um another video for you tonight it's the panasonic forehead vhs hi-fi machine uh this is one of the later panasonic machines it's a pv 22k and this was manufactured made in indonesia wow this is a 2002 model so this machine is 12 years old and um well it's got a problem it's actually got a couple problems but one of them i'm not really too worried about sometimes it kicks the tape out when you load it but here's the problem here we try to play a tape on this thing and we get a picture that looks like that it will not track the tape so we know what the problem with this is this is a a tape path alignment problem that's why the scope's warmed up here and we're going to tear into this machine now this machine is probably one of the worst made machines i've ever seen in my life i mean we just open this thing up there's only like a couple screws that hold the back on look at this thing i mean this is just utter crap you know talk about the epitome of cheapness i have never in my life seen anything quite as bad as this this is this is the definitely the disposable vcr um you know it's just i thought some of the other panasonic machines made over the years who are cheap but let's just take a look at the sucker and just i mean i don't want to go there let's just take a look at this thing you know panasonic wanted to make a sub 100 machine and this was certainly it this was probably a 1600 machine or less everything's on one circuit board a lot of you know maybe only one or two ics power supply look at that it's part of the main board so there's no separate power supply in this thing and it's really really cheap you know that little race head it's just just uh ugh i mean yeah it moves the the the audio control head i mean it's just talk about a really ridiculously cheap chassis look at the you know even the tape transport plastic wheels you know um i didn't want to get into that mechanism on this thing this is one of these ones where you throw it away but i take it one of these guides is gonna be loose they're plastic too look at this the bases and everything are plastic i have no idea where we're gonna scope this thing i see there's some test points down here and i see that there's some test points over here one of these is going to be the rf and another one's going to be the head switching so let's find the test points so that we can try and do an alignment on the scene and see if we can bring this machine back from the dead let's just get a look at how this thing threads get a loading gear here oh look at how loose that thing is i mean this ah it's just horrible okay so that's how the tape threads on this it's a fully loaded look at this the motor is on top no more no more having the motor mounted below the chassis they actually mount uh the stator unit is on top of the uh it's on top of the head drum the rotary transformers in the bottom here you can see where the video heads are connected to the rotary transformer uh let's get the scope on here and see what we can see what we can find okay we got the scope probe here and we're gonna look for our test point that looks as good a ground as any play and we'll just start uh probing to see oh that looks like that might be rf right there that looks like an rf test point where's the head switching no that's an rf test point okay one of them's probably the audio hi-fi and the other one is the video heads i'm thinking this being a hi-fi machine we'd have two separate uh so what's on these test points here not that one oh that one's got a pulse on it what's that one got up that one looks like it may be okay that one looks like a switching point yeah that one's a switching point you see that so that's what we're going to hook our our probe too which i really don't have a probe so i'm just using a jumper clipped onto the end of this rca plug because one of my scope probes is gone tits up which one did i say i'm gonna grab that test point right at the back here right next to the live power supply right the place i really want to be connecting things into okay that gives us a trigger and we can clip on and we'll just crank the the gain up yeah okay there we go okay yeah that looks that looks terrible uh you can see the waveform on the scope here it uh yeah it's bad and that's why our picture is as bad as it is so um we'll just adjust these guides and see whether we can improve this at all okay try this one okay we're making some changes here picture's getting better okay oh look at that look at that that's yeah that's well i'm not even using an alignment tape i'm just using a a tape that i actually recorded on the sony machine so um after i aligned it so this is actually probably pretty close that's the i'm just bringing the level down a bit here on the leading edge and we'll take it back up so you can see the leading edge here and this is the entrance side guide and we're just trying to bring that flat which we have it the exit side guide is relatively flat so that's it and it's playing so i'm going to try my my pre-recorded tape that i have here we'll just load this one up and see how this one looks and again the waveform is nice and flat and the picture is good go to fast forward here back to play this was the uh the promo tape for the old steadicam junior was shipped out with the steadicam junior to show kind of the invention of it but um yeah we can see the waveform is flat it looks great uh it's about as good as it's going to get i think and i used to love handheld shooting and uh where is it written after all that a camera operator has to be any less mobile than the rest of humanity yeah that looks pretty good that's about as good as i think we're going to get on this machine here the picture is perfect so uh just that's a little quick and uh quick and dirty video on how to align a panasonic one of the newer machines well i say newer it's still 12 years old so it's not a new machine but this is utter garbage this one and you know i mean it's no wonder these things are selling for 69 or whatever the price of them was because uh they certainly there's not much in them anymore they are um really really really really it are cheaply built so remember when video cameras used to be that big three pounds yeah that uh unit that he's uh playing with there that was the original steadicam and uh yeah it actually worked quite well i used to have actually i still have one but unfortunately the cameras have now gotten a lot lighter and it doesn't work very well with them they're too that was for a camera of a specific weight and if you don't have a camera that's that weight well it's not going to work very good anyway there we go there's the uh there's the machine that's fixed we'll eject the tape and put another machine back together hope you enjoyed it just a close-up shot to show where we connected the scope probes so the trigger is right there if we can get any closer but that's the test point for the trigger and the rf from the head amplifier is right there tp 3002 and that's about it

Channel: 12voltvids

Views: 72,410

Keywords: vhs, alignment, tape, scope

Id: wksbuYIifBw

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 18 2014