Vintage Cassette Deck - first steps in repairing a cassette deck that appears 100% non functional.

here's the um another Sony tc1 sorry 199 SD uh cassette deck from Sony um I I don't know what it is lately I've come across so many of these Sony tape decks but in this particular one I want to talk a little bit about the repair of cassette decks vintage cassette decks I've um probably gone through hundred of different cassette decks um Tech techniques Pioneer Nakamichi Sansui Akai highend ones midlevel and the entry level ones I've replaced belts I've replaced Motors I've adjusted and replaced heads I've uh rubberized all the um different Wheels caps and wheels I've replaced them um I've res soldered different capacitors in them but I still would not call myself a technician um I did spend some time being mentor Ed by a really good technician spent about 6 months with him learning what I can and then most of my learning has just been through practice now um some of the steps that I go through this cassette deck when I got it it lit up but nothing move none of these functions move rewind play Fast Forward record nothing move nothing would happen at all um so I opened it up and what I recommend you do if you get a sit situation where nothing is moving and it is lit up and the deck itself seems like it's in pretty good shape then more than likely what is going on here is that the cassette deck is probably just sat idle for a long time and some cases decades so things just haven't been moving so um to open this up you remove the wood paneling and then that also holds on the uh the top of it and then the top comes off the whole thing comes off and then behind the tape transport in here you'll have most of the belts and gears and and what have you and the motor now so I took the the top off and this is what I do with all of them and then I try to move the functions the first thing I do is I've see check to see if the motor is moving the motor in this deck is back about here now the in this particular one the motor was not moving there are two belts hooked up to the motor one to the main capson and the other one two secondary ones that operate the fast forward and the rewind so what I do at that point and what I did with this one um because what you don't really want to do um is replace things because to replace things you have to take the transport apart and then put it all back together and then you could run the possibility of damaging it stripping some of the screws losing some of the screws are simply forgetting how to put it all back together you go back to your schematics and you could end up being a problem and then when you get it back together things are set in such a way um that they need to be set exactly the same way and if they're not the sound quality or some of the functions could end up not working even if you have replaced the belts so what I do is I check the belts and make sure that they're still there of course that they haven't disintegrated and they still have some degree of tness to them and they're somewhat tight around where they should be and in this case this one it was so then I just simply the belts are from the motor and they're going to different gears on the transport I simply move those gears a little bit back and forth going slowly and slowly back not too much you don't want to damage anything just sort of gently move back and forth and all the different things so what I found after I did that would happen is that I would push play it would run for a little bit like maybe a couple rotations and then stop fast forward and Rewind they wouldn't still wouldn't work so I work the gears a little bit more at this point I haven't taken anything apart except just the top work it a little bit more slowly moving all those little gears back and forth by hand and then eventually things click in and we do have movement now so it's rewinds perfect fast forward's perfect play perfect so what what happened was with this cassette deck and a lot of vintage cassette Decks that you get is people aren't using them they're sitting around in garages storage compartments closets and they're not being used and they seize up when they're not being used they need to be used quite regularly um everything was good luckily there's no Replacements of belts required the motors anything like that so you simply need to get the thing back to life and so that's what I did with this particular one and it worked now that doesn't always work sometimes you do need to replace belts sometimes you do need to um fix damage Motors sometimes other adjustments are needed but the first thing I would do is what I just describe slowly go through all of the different gears and um work them by hand just to get the life back together now that I've got this one working what I am going to do is I'm going to open it back up again and clean everything out with a Q-tip probably using just a little bit of a rubbing alcohol clean all the old um pieces out and then apply um a little bit of oil to the motor and a little bit of um oil to some of the other Springs and areas where you see in there making sure you don't put any oil anywhere near where the belts go because you don't want those to slip and then it should be good for um some time to come so that's that's what I do again I am not a professional technician but I've been doing as I said God I would say close to over maybe two 300 of these cassette techs a lot of them are posted on my um on this channel the say hello hello YouTube channel U but most of them aren't um anyways this is the Sony I've been through what this one does I think it's a very good deck this is the Sony tc99 SD it's it's a very substantial deck it's got some weight to it and uh it's got lots of lots of necessary functions here I do have another video that talks a little bit more of the details of what this one does so if you're interested in that go and have a look I just wanted to use this video just to talk a little bit about what I do when I get a um vintage cassette deck in thanks for watching

Channel: Say Hello Hello

Views: 257

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Id: VyJRPpgMZkU

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2024