VCR Eats Tapes. The Most Common Causes Part 1 of 2

in this video I'm going to talk a little bit about VCR repair something I've yet to make a video on anyway uh used to be a lot of money in these things unfortunately there aren't as many people that won them repaired nowadays but every now and then somebody still brings one in and this particular one the gentleman brought it in complaining that the VCR eight tapes now that can come from a variety of different reasons but I'm going to talk about one of the more common ones that a lot of people probably don't know about and that's the corroded mode switch now if you ever look at the bottom of the VCR sometimes the mode switch is mounted on the circuit board itself and sometimes it's on the chassis this one's chassis mounted and let me take it out here so you can see what this thing looks like this was a real real easy one to take apart I'm happy to say now this is the mode switch right here and it's got the low contact points right here that make contact with the circuit board and the way it works is this thing the mode switch rotates and the reason it rotates it's got it's a rotary switch and it lets a microprocessor know what mode the VCR is in so for example if it's in the you know the play mode and you're pushing the eject button it's not going to let the eject button work and that's because the mode switch has multiple contacts in it and kind of lets it know what position it's in now because he seems corroded inside a lot of guys who just replace them but I found that you can clean them I've had a lot of success cleaning them and there's a trick to get them apart first of all I used to try to push in these tabs right here on the side and what would often happen is that into breaking them you don't want to do that but if you're clever if you have maybe three hands available at once which most of us don't you might be able to push in or four hands rather you might be able to push in four tabs at once but another way to get these things apart a lot of times you could just take a flat blade screwdriver carefully put it under here and see if I can do this without damaging anything Oh before I proceed I almost forgot the most important point these things have to be lined up when you put everything back together here if you don't get it lined up you can end up in big trouble in fact if we look closely at the gear down here you'll notice that there's a little hole on this Kier and I'm going to take my marking pin I'm going to draw a little little mark right there I've done enough of these so where I kind of know how things are supposed to be lined up here but basically if I was to rotate the belt that you can't see in this video it would move the position of this gear and it would mess everything up now the same with the mode switch the mode switch has a little indentation on it if you look carefully it's not real big but let me see if I put my finger behind you can kind of see the indentation is right right here you get that thing I've alignment when you put the most wedge switch back in you're going to be in a lot of trouble so I'm going to go ahead and take my screwdriver now and pry this thing apart and hopefully I'll have success let's see if I get this there we go oh hey look at that popped right out I got lucky there's the back side if you look you've got these little bike brushes that as they rotate they make contact with the the metal inside here and what happens is the metal gets really corroded over time and so what I do to clean it up I've got one of these pens here what do you call this thing it's designed for cleaning cleaning the paint off circuit board traces so if you're going to solder onto circuit board trace you'd rub these this is like a fiberglass in the bottom of this pen shaped thing here back I've got an old one here that got from RadioShack a long time ago oh sorry pretty messy I've had it for years basically it's got a brush that I can I can turn this thing I can make the fiberglass hairs stick out here and this one's got essentially the same thing so what I do is I take this fiberglass pen and I rub it inside the mode switch like this and I do this for a while I may do it for a couple minutes just to where I know I've really cleaned up all the corrosion inside there I want that thing to get real shiny and get rid of that all that corrosion not just corrosion but it's also got a lubricant in there that seems to like it yellows over time and it gets all corroded so what I do is I clean this up for a while get it all clean by the way I don't know if a lot of you guys go back far enough you remember the first TV tuners that came out they had similar contacts in them and those things were always corroding so anybody that owned a TV did well to also have a can of tuna cleaner with the TV because you always had to spray inside the contacts in the tuner they're always oxidizing in fact I met a guy that opened a TV repair shop next to the beach knowing it'd be a great business and he turned out to be right had a lot of jobs just cleaning up the tuners for people that was the good old days when used to be able to make a lot of money doing this sort of stuff now it's not so good anyway I've been doing it so many years it's hard to walk away from it so anyways you can see that's a lot cleaner in there now so what I'm going to do I'm going to let me see I could take some tuner cleaner I never trust tuner cleaner just to lubricated I want to use a silicon grease in fact what I use I use a dialectic tune-up grease it's a silicone grease I think it's pretty good stuff I'm just going to take a little paper towel and rub it around there and just a little bit more just to get all that old grease out of there I think I've pretty much cleaned it up there we go the other thing too worth cleaning I noticed that on the side here these metal contacts they've they've been pretty well oxidized too I'm going to go ahead and clean these up some of the other things that can cause your VCR to eat tapes is a slipping belt I guess the clutch mechanisms can go bad from time to time and they can cause you problems too but I think the most which is one of the more common ones and a lot of people don't know about it fact I should advertise it you can send me your VCR and maybe I'll get it going you know what I don't like her those dual VCRs there we go that looks a lot cleaner I don't like those dual units that have the DVD player built into them those things just aren't made to be worked on even this one is almost questionable as to whether it was worth working on it or not so I'm going to do now is going to take some like dielectric tuneup grease I'm going to put it inside here kind of move it around a little bit I don't want to put too much and I don't want to put too little I want to make sure everything gets good and coated here and then I'm going to pop it back together and spin it a few times by hand and hopefully that will take care of it I'm kind of squeezing the tube not real hard just enough to make sure I get a little coating on on all the terminals here it looks pretty good well it sure looks a lot better than it did anyway so now this thing here this has got the brushes on it kind of hard to see I suppose but it's got the two two little brushes there they kind of as the thing turns it kind of spins every one so I pry these up a little bit I I try to be gentle because what's the old saying if it ain't broke don't fix it I figured these things might lost a little bit of their spring so I just bent it up just a tad bit and I suppose I could clean these these things these brushes - although I don't think that's much of a problem there we go so I'm going to pop this back together now if I can see if I can get this back in here I've got it hard to get that thing lined up just right well there we go there we go well just for the record the VCR is working great now I had a little problem lining up the loading carriage but I finally got it in there and I think I'm in business alright hope you enjoy the video see y'all in the next one

Channel: Grants Pass TV Repair

Views: 231,880

Keywords: VCR eats tapes, Tape gets stuck in VCR, Dirty mode switch, Tape stuck in VCR

Id: MlJpRcu31Zc

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2016