Seller said it's broke, but its not?! Nakamichi DR3 Cassette Deck Repair & Service!

hello guys right then on the back of uh the crazy amount of views that I seem to get off that Moran's 2ed draw deck I have got a Nakamichi dr3 which is actually from the I would say the Pinnacle kind of time of Nakamichi this is a the late 80s early 90s I think it is this stuff is the highest possible quality you could pull out of a cassette deck this is a dr3 which is a two-head deck however just because it's a two-head deck the frequency response on these and the level of build is unbelievable this is a particularly clean example this is a dr3 as I said and it's coming I'm not sure where this came from I've had it for a while now I can't actually remember where I got it from but it has issues let's say so let's give it a test and see what issues it has so looking along the front end pretty straightforward twoed cassette deck as I said the features we have on this one with' we've got our usual tape selector which quite nicely says tape one 2 and four rather than CX ZX and whatever it usually says we've got Dolby B and C we've got a nice bias tuning knob there which is always Pleasant to have on any deck we've got full logic control for the play and Rewind and stop Etc and we have recording level knobs there for the balance and the master output as Nakamichi always do this has a particularly funky Orange dial and gauge which I like than the newer ones sometimes have green I like this kind of orange 8s kind of vibe so let's play a tape and see what happens today's test tape is salt and pepper and the uh Greatest Hits I believe it is all right so when we inputed the tape there it should kind of rewind it back a little bit it kind of did and didn't so let's play this and see what happens so I've pressed play there and it actually seems to be doing nothing and yet the time is going crazy and it thinks it's playing so I'll stop that let's try fast forward and Rewind nothing on Fast Forward rewind doesn't do anything whatsoever it just stops and I'll try to play One More Time it seems like it's engaging the heads but oddly it's just going a bit crazy so let's pop the uh the door cover off this is really heavy these the as I said the quality of these is lovely this is a solid bit of metal some nice copper pads on the bottom there which is pretty cool so let's see if we can see a bit better what's going on with this door I'm going to try pressing play it head's engaging weirdly the right hand reel is turning so when I press play the right hand reel it's turning like it's fast forwarding but it should be playing and I suspect that's not doing much good to my tape this is unusual let me just check this tape hasn't yeah the do's a little bit slow as well oh well that's interesting my test taper snapped so maybe maybe we're all right maybe the tape's knacked Charles and Dave never lets me down so let's try this again right let's try play we seem to be playing which is good rewind and fast forward that all seems to be working so this deck came with this tape in it so is this the reason why somebody sold it and they didn't realize it was snapped the same as I didn't realize it was snapped to be honest with you I'm not a massive salt and pepper fan I don't have the case but with good old Chaz and Dave this seems to be producing output but here's what we'll do we'll strip it down change the belts give everything a good clean out and a service get it calibrated and see where we go from there along with the fuses in a plug checking your test tape is maybe a lesson to be learned guys so this is fit for the bin so looking inside then we have a slightly shiny but clean pinch roller which looks original and we have a Dusty set of heads but everything seems to be in order aside from the dust we got a pretty standard sanor transpot which is in most of these two and three Ed Nakamichi deck from the era these have their own issues I suppose but let's take the top off and see what we got inside so what I like about these decks is the fact that they actually have three screws on the side it's not often you get a deck with three screws on the side and to me that denotes a little bit of quality so let's uh pop this top off wow that is clean that is immaculate absolutely Immaculate uh pretty straightforward Sano transport there NAA meets you motor the some of them actually have Sano written on the real motor there this is the later model as well so it doesn't have the idler Tire controlling your fast for and Rewind which means it's got the Cog which is a hell of a lot better because you don't have to mess about with changing the idler Tire or it doesn't lose its friction you have plastic on plastic nice little features like these little copper uh tabs there for the Earths you got one hell of a power button extension there but as I say this thing looks immaculate I would suggest that someone's redone all of our cable ties so possibly someone's been in here before all our transistors on a nice cooling rack there and all the Caps look fine visually the deck look absolutely perfect and as you can just see from the test that we did a minute ago it seems to be kind of playing something so what I am going to do is I do have a belt which is from web spare parts I'm not affiliated with these guys whatsoever but generally for the netri stuff the these are probably about the best I can find that you're not spending 50 Quid on a belt for a lot of the American guys like to Shell out on a belts but honestly unless you got a dragon or something you're not going to notice the difference you're just going to feel a bit better maybe you know I don't think I'd feel better paying 50 Quid for a belt but that's just me so let's get the transport out and have a look in the back of it so we got our uh P feed cable there for the transport first the blue and black one the little one is the light for our the uh behind the tape on the front panel of the transport there and what else we got and the smaller one there is also for power and then we have the gray one which someone is nicely fed through the capacitors of the deck is your audio feed from your head and the smaller gray one which is just down here is your power supply to your erase head all really easy to identify which is going we because all the plugs are different and all pretty straightforward to stick back in uh it seems there's a screww missing off the top of the transport there which is the top returning screw that's fine we can find another returning screw for that so the two are underneath and then once you got these two out from underneath the transport is removed that way and as Paul Daniel says just like that those two screws from underneath are out and although these are kind of tight it should really now pull with no real issue um he says just careful wiggling and the transport should come out in one unit just be careful what what it's wrapped around because there are significant wires for the unit that aren't transport related there we got one sanure transport let's have a look at the transport then I hope my lighting's all right cuz I've got a light behind the camera I might just ease that off a little bit there we go so sanio transports in all sorts of stuff from the time period these are mostly metal relatively high quality especially at the time but actually really simplistic we have a main Capstone motor here which as you can see is the belts in place but it is um seems it's got a bit of mold on it this is the real motor and then you also have this kind of mod select motor down the bottom which has some leaf springs down in there and that indicates to the deck what mode it's in is it and plays it rewind fast forward Etc so what do we need to do with this so first of all we need to get this belt off which is a case of removing this p and that all just pops off to remove the to replace the belt common faults and problems on these transports it's well documented this real motor here if not used very often can develop uh dead spots which will cause the decks to stop randomly not play and well that's it really not much of a solution to this other than replacing them you can replace them directly with a ACI one which is like a Japanese or Chinese Cheapo version but it's direct replacement they're about 7 quid if you're going for originality and quality and all the rest of stuff people like to try and split these down and clean them out I personally can't be bothered for the sake of having a brand new motor it is hugely essential that those Leaf switches down there are cleaned out because that can cause player battery wi fast forward problems if they're not cleaned out properly it can't detect what mode it's in and it'll just rewind randomly or pause or the head uh head raft will flap up and down a couple of times and it gets a bit silly but honestly looking at this now it's pretty clean anyway the uh the head and everything looks fine the pinch roll looks fine but we look at that closer later I prefer to leave the pinch rollers on Nakamichi gear rather than replace it with a cheap plasticky one because honestly they're usually pretty good everything seems nice and smooth basically that's it see where we go from there in fact you know what I was going to do this in fast forward but I won't because actually if you're looking to do these jobs on the same deck me stripping this down and fast forward isn't going to help anybody is it so you can obviously skip this bit unless you're doing this Seno transport yourself but I'll take you through the little journey um it is possible to do this without removing these cable ties but in all honesty just making your life worse so we'll clip and replace all three of these you got to be very careful you don't end up nipping the wires that's the only thing one two three in my experience with these a lot of issues is caused for when you're servicing it catching the wires on the motor as well some of these wires can be a bit thin and a little bit rubbish so just be a bit wary of that when you're working on these transports just do a little bit of wire threading now it should give us more access to the MTAR plate which is we're trying to remove we're trying to remove this plate here so we got another screw there I'm not sure this has been serviced the way that these screws are kind of um clicking you know they've never been removed or ret talked or anything so once this motor plate is free to maneuver then just watch your real motor wires up here and uh just find the magic way of doing it really here we go kind of rotates around that way and then it'll allow you to get to your capston and your belt let's have a look at this belt because it's a bit it's a bit moldy uh it's not bad it's not amazing but very shiny on the inside clearly had some miles but we replace that so next thing to do is to pull this capston and once that's out make sure you take a note of which way this brass Bush goes if I can get the camera focus it goes pointing upwards almost with the arms on the side and once you pulled that out you should notice underneath that you have your capston returning washer cast those to one side and sometimes there's a a washer on there as well but on this one nothing but dirt to be honest with you so that is caps out of the way very gently what I'm going to do next is remove this face plate which means we have to eject the mechanism so just press this back and let the mechanis ISM come out and then it's these two screws you might have to uh clean out the soft claws mechanism on the door which is again pretty straightforward they're just full of grease and that grease becomes a bit hard this plate then comes away and as I said that is your blue and black wire just be careful to get it around the back of that leaf um switch not spring and then as I said to you this is the newer transport so in the middle there you've got a a cog instead of a wheel with a tire on it idler Tire this is absolutely Immaculate this transport I don't know where it's been um in in an air cooled bag I think to be honest but this just allows us to get in to do a little bit more cleaning this doesn't have a back tension belt on the side there so I'm I'm maybe think of the later model or the earlier model gives us access to this leaf spring we're going to clean that but it's always good to remove that and get a good look at what we're actually dealing with so I think the first thing we'll do is give this all the the capston bushing everything and where the capston goes a good scoo out and then we will have a look at any places that need a regrease such as the head raft there is some grease on there and it feels very smooth so I'm not going to completely strip down the entire transport but we will touch a little bit of Grease here and there and then this bar on the side here is your soft claws mechanism which is a bit too soft if I'm honest with you probably needs all the grease scooching out and replacing just to give us a bit more oomph the grease is not jellified that's in it it still feels absolutely fine so yeah let's do a bit of cleaning now I won't Bor you with the cleaning but I'm going to get cotton Buds and IPA all into the way the Capstone goes anywhere that is rotational anywhere the capston goes in amongst this bit I can possibly get my oiling needle into the back of the real motor there to try and get some on the on the axle if I can get it through the top here I can get it down through there and I don't think this needs much if I'm Hest with [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right then I think we are mostly about as clean as we're going to get it was already pretty clean anyway I'll be perfectly honest with you so it didn't really take that much effort so now we're getting on to the rebuild and I'd also like to clean lost lost me a little tool I'd also like to clean the leaf switches as well and I'll show you how would do that so the leaf switches themselves are these bad boys here so you'll notice it's basically two bits of brass let's see if you can zoom in there it's two bits of brass and they make contact like that so it's very important that they're cleaned up so what I like to use is some very very fine wet and dry and I cut it into some little strips here and then I just insert it between the two parts and then just a little bit of a clean on that side and the same on the other if we can get it in between that's all it takes and then there is some on the back there is one uh there is one up here which is actually closed as you can tell I think that one actually might be the tape insertion switch off the top of my head I cannot remember as I said these are very very clean anyway but they're must be cleaned as part of a service because if you don't do it you'll be taking the transport back out again it's very very light and very gentle and always use decent quality em purp as well so it doesn't end up leaving loads of rubbish inside your transport and then somehow we have to do the same with those three in there you can just see those three which is why I cut my memy paper into very small strips so if I can somehow wiggle some of these wires out the way and then while the cap stands out with these transports I like to go lengthways like so and sometimes you put a little bit of downwards pressure on using I like to use a ceramic screwdriver but just a little tiny bit that's all you need right then so they're done so what we're going to do next let's get this belt and capster and everything back in close the transport up and position it this way and then we're going to move all this things out the way our nice clean capston can go back in so what we've got then we've got our capston we've got our retaining washer we have this brass washer and then final thing to go on is this mild steel washer and here's how I do it where's my oil at we get our cassette deck oil up and I P a dab and then our brass Po and then tiniest dab and then our mild steel washer if I can get all the bloody thing I'll still washer on the top that's on there and then ADB just a dab and then a dab on the capson shaft Itself by start start there so you don't want it on this top bit so when you insert it down now you'll never get oil on this end which is what's going to touch your tip and then simply insert without catching anything okay and then naami recommends grease on this ball bit and I use mot DX so a little bit of Grease not too much too much is too much like so and then we put we put our motor in everything back on now there's a plastic plate there which goes on top and that is where you grease is going to settle so here in lies the challenge now of fitting this belt so make sure your hands are nice and clean you got no nothing on your hands from that grease there's our belt now look at that one how that one sits it's been sat with the the mottor there so it's bent look look at this nice fresh one beautiful what I like to do is belt on the capston belt on the motor and then twist that plate underneath everything like that seems complex but in practice it's not too bad it's these wires at the pin so the beauty of these capson is they're so big that you can afford a little bit of wiggle and right in so need to be underneath the belt and on to the motor I'm going to develop a tool for this I'm going to be a [Music] millionaire and we can thread that underneath like so and then we can put it around our motor underneath yes my hands are in way but that's it [Music] t let that spin and centralize and then it screws back in for that which is your small brass screws this plate sits in Little Feet as well which is quite handy because when when you've got that white wire in the wrong place you can pull it back out again right let's check all your wires are free yes yes yes yes yes yes perfect and when you flip it over now out that Capstone will stay in place and you can use your retaining washer there and what I'll do is the tiniest dab of oil inside your capston bush and then I'll return and washer tweezers and then just press it home like so quite firm sometimes but that's good and then put your finger on the back put some pressure on the capston itself and just make sure that that's not flapping about all over the place but that's all in that's what good I think I'm going to get the oiler in and try and get it just into that real motor if I can capture that on camera because I'm not sure you can see I'm going to go down that hole right down in there like so like that because them real Motors can be a pain in the back if I'm honest sometimes they're good sometimes they're not more so time they've been fine to be honest right then so we've got our lightboard returning plate and this is a great time to give this a little bit of a dust I find that your your trousers are the best place for that and this sits on these little lugs here and here I think we're going to pull this and strip and clean it which involves this horrendous kind of clip this plastic clip here once it's out sco it out get all the grease out repack it and put it back together there we go let's see the Gory details of that just all grease basically I'm going to keep that zoomed in let's see what color this is when it comes out none it's completely dry and then we'll pack this again with grease see that in satisfying closeup around the Piston with the O seal there we go let's redo our our cable ties beautiful I think that we are squared there's one last thing that I didn't do oh do you know what I don't know if I did do I think I did it but it's just a little dab and morar oil in the motor bushing don't forget to oil your Motors I always say that and I'm going to leave that that way around for a couple of seconds so let that fall in to the bushing but we're ready to refit I'm going to let you into a little secret here sometimes I struggle to get these Nakamichi transports back in so you can witness my pain here if this doesn't go to PL here we go ah that was suspiciously easy so for your transport screws are the ones with these lock washers on them just in case you got to the stage where you forgot what screws is what but the top one it only has one and it goes into plastic I think that's why have lot washers if I'm honest with you but now that's there we can just uh commence replugging everything in so long white one over here the uh the short of white one is here and then over this end you've got your black and blue one which is your light on the front which goes in just below that one my big fingers can get it in and then thread the head one and it's counterpart the erase head power underneath this Loom and that one goes there it says erase next to it which is pretty straightforward and then your head is the one that's furthest away which goes over there beautiful so now two screws underneath and we'll give it a test so here we are then turned on let's find our test tape we had Chasm Dave obviously we shouldn't see much difference but it's more to test function rather than anything else that slow closes beautiful goes forward a little bit when you press uh when you insert the T there there we go playing good speed on the fast forward good speed on the rewind play pause works all right that's it on to electronics quick calibration and out the door so here we are in our Spectrum analyzer and I've put my test T in which is 6.3 khz and weirdly this is Mega fast we're at 8K so whether somebody's been here and played with this mot I'm not entirely sure so if you see that line on the bottom right corner above it says 8062 I'm going to turn down the pot on the back of the motor until I get 6300 as you can see that's going down and down and down and this analyzer flicks between 6281 and 6375 when it's in the right place just like that so that is us at the correct speed and really good actually no massive wobble Happy Days speed done all right so I went to do our aouth head alignment as we usually would without aouth test tape and lo and behold that's s in syn from the start no adjustments necessary this is a really really good condition looked after deck there's a little bit of wobble there but honestly my tape has had some use and I could probably do the new tape but when the tape's settling we're good so I'm not going to go any further with the adjustments for that the speed's now fine the Azimuth is good everything's playing as it should be now it's just a case of buttoning it up and taking it for a spin so there we have it then guys this one turned out to be a bit of a strange one really because I I didn't even think to check that tape at the start that was in it when it shaped I thought you know great I've got a tape uh I did not think to even go anywhere near it so whether that was picked up by somebody and then they tested it I'm not entirely sure I think the last thing we got to do now is just give all this a good clean over get in all those gaps and get all that dust out look at that little bit of dust on the front plate there uh and I think that's basically all that's left to do on this and then after that it's just in case you've enjoying it do some recordings have a bit of a play with it and see what happens from there I think this is is going to uh somebody else I'm not entirely convinced I'm going to keep this one I already have one on the floor there and I have one in the rack so I think you can only have too many Nakamichi before you end up with too many Nakamichi but yeah I'm going to get to some cleaning go and enjoy your day and on to the next one the next one is a very special video with a good theme to it as well so I'm building up to that a little bit but yeah that's this one done a nice a nice result with this one and I'll see you on the next one if you like my videos please like And subscribe um my subscription amount is slowly going up it's nice the more subscriptions I have the more people get to see my video it helps the YouTube algorithm blah blah blah so peace

Channel: PW Restoration

Views: 16,590

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Id: l2pvo7V8w30

Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023