Triple-Tape Take-Two (Repair & Demo)

one of the hottest days of the year and I'm saying side with all the studio lights on so uh forgive me if I'm glowing a little bit here a few weeks ago I did a video on this this triple-decker boombox now at the time I wanted to show it to you I thought it was unusual having three cassette decks next to each other I imported this from Japan unfortunately for me it didn't work when I opened it up to see what the problem was I saw the clutch mechanisms had snapped apart and also the bouncer turn to goo and they gone all on the back of the flywheels I realized those fly wheels would need to come out but I didn't know exactly how to get them out of the machine after all I'm not a cassette deck repair expert just some chap who dabbles in these things but I thought well I'm sure there'll be something out there who knows what to do I don't know anyone personally that I can ask but by putting a video out there's going to be a hundred thousand or more people see it and they'll even if it's tiny percentage of those know what to do and get in touch then that will help me out and that's exactly what happened as soon as I put the video out a chap called Callen Christensen on patreon he explained to me how the flywheels were held in with a split washer and how to remove that and then another chap called Chows Lodge said that when you take those washes off often they fly across the room or snap so he sent me across some spares and then another chap called Kevin wolf fell who'd been to a flea market and seen some cassette deck mechanisms for sale in a box that got home he watched my video and he realized those were the same mechanisms he'd seen at the show and he got in so she said do I want them for spares and I said yes and he went and got those for me and sent them over so now I've got the spares I need and hopefully the knowledge I need to be able to get this thing working again so let's see how I got on so I need to remove all three of these flywheels from this side they're held in place on the other side by the split washers which around the cap stands and in addition to that I also need to repair the clutch mechanisms these are the remnants of the previous coach mechanisms that I've found inside the back of the machine and in the box the machine came in but rather than try and glue those together or something I'm just going to take the clutches off this newer mechanism our ascent you might wonder why I don't swap the whole mechanism over well there are subtle differences between the two which means they aren't directly interchangeable back you some of the parts off the new on or my older one incidentally the one that's inside my machine seems like an earlier revision of this tune a shin mechanism which I showed in a previous video the last mechanism being made this is an even cheaper version of it though because they've done away with the clutch I think they just expect the belts are slip but it locked so which seems a very shoddy way of doing things but it'll have saved them a very small amounts of money which is why they've done that so getting back to the task in hand this is the split washer which is holding the whole capstan and flywheel assembly in place if I put a pen next to it you can see just how small it is I think to put something into that split on there just to pull it apart a little bit to fly off past the capstan and that will enable the whole thing to come out how dit flew off as you can see there did much to find it didn't go very far it's made out of plastic which is why it bends like that and you can see it would go around this indentation at the base of the cap style on this side but if we flip it over on to the other side and take the belts off here this whole assembly can now be pulled out through the hole but if I flip this over you can see the problem I was dealing with these the remnants of the belt but they're no longer a belt it's just a rubber gunky mess it's very difficult to clean something like that off without removing these flywheels but taking them off wasn't as difficult as I thought so now it's just a matter of cleaning them and in this video you won't see we do much cleaning but that's what I was doing the most of over and over again until absolutely no black marks came onto the cloth whatsoever I was using isopropyl alcohol you don't any card a gum cleft on there so with that cleaned I noticed I've got this little spring on here with a piece of plastic next to it I thought well where's that come from this is all we need a broker something else blade turns out that's what it looked like when I took the wheel off it was underneath like that so it fell off previously turns out this is the pause mechanism so it's easy just to pop that back in place you can see how it kind of latches onto the pause button there so we'll move on now to repairing the clutch mechanism on this one the cap that should be holding all in place had split which is why all fell apart so that's the part I'll be taking off one of these other clutches and it does fit all by they're all the same size one difference though is the felt washer is glued to the bottom of the clutch on this whereas mine it was a separate washer so I'll just put the original washer back in its place I'll use the new wheel off the new one though it doesn't have any kind of belt gunk inside it the spring goes on the top of there and then the new cap goes on top of that so there we go that's a newly assembled clutch mechanism exactly how it should be and it will now work for a number of years hopefully hopefully we won't split again like the previous one maybe they just use the wrong kind of plastic on it or something but once we put this wheel back in here the flywheel get the belts underneath there and onto the new clutch and you can see that's all working fine now this is the old drive belt on the right here this one because it's deform so I'll put a new belt on for that it looked fine but it it doesn't look fine when you take it off so that goes on the upper of two wheels on the other one nearest to the center of the motor and over the top of the flywheel so just spin that to make sure everything's in its place now don't worry about these belts being twisted they are square belt so these sort of automatically untwist themselves as you just spin them around so nothing to worry about there but a bit of tape over that so it doesn't all fall out when I turn it upside down put the plastic split ring on there again slide it down the capstan until it clicks in place that little indentation and then I could take the tape off and just show that everything's running smoothly and yeah fine so that's the first one done quite happy with that so if this was a single deck we would have been done at that point but we moving onto deck 2 here I'll split the washer again and it's popped off and there is a found its upper that's one side out again we're taking out that flywheel and Curzio just as before the belts turn to a sorry mess on the back of there so that all needs cleaning off interesting though how one of the belts did that where's the other belt seems relatively fine but still I'll need to replace both of them I'm going to use this belt out of the other mechanism and notice how it's looped around a piece of plastic here that piece of plastic forms the pawls mechanism so you need to take that out to get the belts off this one so I can put it on the other one but this is good practice because I now know how the pause mechanism all fits together there's a couple of components here one goes underneath the other one so what's I figured that arrow it's our down know to repeat that when I put the on the original machine and just again you take that pause switch off slide the belt underneath and put the pause switch back in the middle of the belts again now I'll hook that under the motor to the outer of the two wheels and I'll just bend it over the top of the motor to hold it in place while I work on the rest of it now this is the belt that replaces the one that turned to tar that goes underneath the flywheel it would be quite difficult to get that honor thing without taking the flywheel off it would be quite hard to see but with the flywheel removed it's quite simple just push it underneath there and then loop the other end around the clutch wheel so now I can bring the belt in from the motor that I've hooked over the top put it on the flywheel make sure that's in position and then put the clutch back together again which involves putting the spring on there and the new cap on top spin it around a bit check everything's working as it should do and then spin it over and put the split washer back on the capstan pushing it down until it clicks into position and then moving on to deck number one this one's a little bit different it needed a circuit board removing out of the way the original clutch wasn't broken but I did replace it because if two of them have snapped it's only a matter it's are about imagine before the first one does the same thing also with this one it's difficult to remove that flywheel once I take of the clip off I thought it would have just slid out like the other ones did but no the bracket that's holding the motor in place for this one he's fouling the wheel so I can't get that out and Slav loosens it a little bit and I can pull the flywheel out and you can see on here there's not too much on the back of there and that means that some of that belt is elsewhere inside the machine so I just had a bit of a look around er there's a little bit down in here as well so that needed to be removed so a bit of cleaning of the rest of the machine was needed on this part now the belt just like the other ones goes underneath the flywheel and across to the clutch the belt on this one it's a little bit shorter than on the other two decks because it's got its own dedicated motor so it doesn't need to reach quite as far so it's just a matter of putting new belts on putting the circuit board back in position putting the bracket back where it should be taping down the flywheel putting the clip on there again that's it I think I've got it all back together there so I'm really quite happy with that just a matter of putting it all back inside the case again if we just put some one side for a moment the fact it needed repairing overall it does have that nineteen eighties Japanese build quality to it that you don't find in similar devices from the nineties for starters clearly designed to come apart the wires are socketed rather than soldered four screws hold all the three cassette decks in place the plastic is of a good thickness it doesn't creak it doesn't flex he's got a nice finish on it everything fits back together neatly the past that failed we're really just unfortunate a dodgy batch of melting rubber belts and plastic clutch caps that split somewhere over the course of 34 years but it turns out that provided you've got the correct spares both of these problems are surprisingly easy to rectify this has been the most satisfying repair job I've done so far just a few weeks ago getting this back together was beyond my capabilities but now thanks to the generosity of others it's up and running again I've got to say beyond the novelty though of the triple decks this is a very bare-bones device as though noise reduction doesn't have alternate verse it's not going to digital tuner doesn't have soft touch controls it really is quite a simple machine but even though it's using a very basic mechanical mechanism they have managed to give it a few little neat features so let's see in operation [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] right let me talk about the switch is on the top of the machine starting from the left that is the tape type to the right on position it's for metal or chrome tape that's just for playback though if you want to record you record on to type one tape and that's in the left hand position the next switch long is the source so in the far right position that's for the line inputs on the right side of machine this stereo RCA line ends next position radio next one along record from the built-in microphone on to take three and then far left position is just the cassettes it's also kind of off unless you've got one of the cassettes moving now tape three is your main cassette deck for recording onto if you record off the radio it could only go onto tape three if you recall from the microphone it's on to tape three as well however tape two can record but it's really just a dubbing deck that is if you're recording tape one on two tapes two and three you can do two copies at the same time so take two is for dubbing tape three is for the main recording you've got to do high-speed dubbing move that switch to the right on side there so let's have a look at the dubbing in action so I'm going to put two blank tapes in while in tape two one in tape three I'm gonna put retro grooves volume three in deck number one and I'm going to use this dual synchro record function to get this to activate you have to put decks two and three in to record pause once you got deck to pause that also holds deck three so you can then take the pause off that one and then when you press play on deck one both of those will immediately start recording [Laughter] two copies up tape one well one side of it at least if I wanted to record the other side of course I'd have to take all the three tapes out flip them over and do the whole thing again all these functions work although it is over egging some of them a little bit for example it says OneTouch record what does that mean well if you press down the record button the play button goes down at the same time and relay play works exactly how you'd expect you've put decks two and three on pause and then when deck one reaches the end it activates deck two and then when that one reaches the end of the tape deck three stars of course with this not being an auto reverse machine you're listening to one side of three tapes the TPS or tape program sensor is a way for you to find a next track on a tape provided that there's a gap of silence between the tracks so once you've got the tape in the play mode press either rewind or fast-forward the tape will move along until it finds that silence and then hold it in that position to get it to play you have to press stop which sounds a bit back-to-front but this is the only way they could implement it on a mechanism like this with no servo activation there's one thing I definitely should clarify otherwise people will ride soon you can see all three tapes working at the same time here and yet earlier on I said you can't play all three at the same time so which is it well this is just a weird quirk if you put the switch into the microphone mode which is really designed for you to record onto tape 3 you can get the other two tapes to spin at the same time there's absolutely no point behind it other than it looks cool but it doesn't really do anything other than that I wonder how much power I'm getting through when I'm rewinding all three of these at the same time though does this thing eat batteries I haven't managed to use it enough to burn through any years it's probably not that bad because I'm just using two motors but I did test the batteries out just to check they were good before moving on to the next test let's do some speed and Wow and flutter measurements on this this isn't going to be great remember this is a budget machine but looking at that one first of all that was 2.5% fast which is quite fast naught point three percent Wow of so which is kind of expected for this machine now people always say well you can change the speed by adjusting this little screw on the back of the motor and yes you can that's what that's there for although good luck try to do that while the motors are inside this machine facing away from you and buried in the back there ya suppose it's possible if you were to do something weird but yeah most people wouldn't be adjusting that so let's move on and have a look at deck - well this is a bit better on the speed 1% fast here but a little worse on the one-footed not 0.6% a bit blurry there as well so sorry about that deck 3 1.2% fast nought point one five percent we're on foot so the best way will flutter on deck three but deck two had the best speed it's all a bit variable really but one thing I wanted to test was how would these results be affected by dubbing by test tape across to a blank tape so we've got a three thousand Hertz signal on tape one we've got a blank tape in deck three call it that across a single speed on one side and then flip it over and do high speed dubbing on the other side and then we'll compare the results between those two recordings now this is real and you've you see stuff the kind of thing that YouTube was designed for but I better come up with the results before anyone has a heart attack so first off surprisingly good normal speed 2% fast naught point three percent Wow and flutter on the copy so that's better the deck wad on its own which was 2.5% fast originally you'd imagine you combine that with deck three and get a worse result but no are then high speed dubbing better still nor point six percent fast the best result so far and naught point two percent Wow and flutter and I think what's happened here is by having going fast and having two decks going at the same time we've actually put quite a bit of drain on that battery which has slowed everything down comparatively speaking and we're getting better results with two decks going at the same time than just one deck on its own so a bit of a surprising result that turns out that high speed dubbing provides a better quality of speed and where will flutter then it were just playing one tape on its own but then again this is a bit of an odd machine all round and that's what I loved about it so these offers are very typical performance for a big 1980s portable stereo but I can't dislike that it's a very honest if you saw a bright red plastic triple deck stereo system on a shelf in a shop in 1985 you wouldn't think that thing was going to outperform an AK Ameche and all the features it says it has it has and they all work which is something I can't say for this boom box that I bought a couple of weeks ago which doesn't even have stereo on it and it says it's got an automatic program search system but it turns out they just put a sticker on there because they didn't even know what a PSS stood for this is stereo and it's surprisingly good stereo great separation for obvious reasons but the quality of it is fine I mean it's a nice well-rounded sound to it I've enjoyed listening to tapes on this well I've been putting this video together the radios got great research as well so really I can't fault it it is exactly what it looks like it is how it works exactly how you'd expect and that is although thanks to the people have helped me out putting this video together because I didn't know how to repair this a couple of weeks ago and now it's back working again so I've got to thank everyone that's helped me with this while it's great when something turns out as good as this house but that is it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 408,118

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Boombox, cassette, portable stereo, tape, triple, three tape, stereo, 1980s, retro, retrotech, audio, hifi, repair, tanashin, mechanism, disassembly, fix, belts, black, tar, flywheel, demonstration, dubbing, copying, tape to tape, rx 333, national, panasonic

Id: RjfExPMyX0c

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 28 2019