This Walkman is the size of a case for a cassette tape.
Sony was able to fit all the mechanics and electronics inside this Walkman,
and even include automatic feather touch controls. Three years ago I replaced the belt and
capacitors, and it started playing tapes again. It's now time to replace the damaged pinch roller.
So I can play both sides of a tape. Without having to flip it over each time.
One of the things I like about analogue equipment is the unique character,
and the challenge of getting good sound. This Walkman is now over 30 years old. When
I first got it it had been left with a capstan pressing against one of the rubber pinch rollers.
It was the pinch roller for playing the reverse side of the tape. The pressure of the capstan has
deformed the roller and it needs to be replaced. I purchased a suitable replacement from eBay.
There is a service manual available for a similar model, the WM-701C. Which gives us some clues
about how to take the assembly apart on this model. I'm going to have to be very careful as
I attempt this repair. I'll start with taking off the lid. There's a nice close-up on the mechanism.
OK with the mechanism all working, I'm to see if I can make this adaptor which I made in the previous
video, look a bit better. So the way I made this was to get an old computer expansion card,
and then I cut it into the right size to fit into the socket on the Walkman.
Inside the Walkman according to the service manual, pin two, so starting from this side,
one, two, Pin two is ground. Now the pins on this card don't exactly match up
with the pins on the connector. But it only needed to match up with three of the pins for it to work.
So I cut it to size, so that would connect up to pins two,
four and seven. So there's the headphone socket. There's the ground for the common,
and then left and right. So just three wires from the headphone socket, lined up with the three pins
I need to connect to on the Walkman. And that seems to work fine. But it doesn't look so good.
So I'm going to see if I can at least make it look a little bit better. That's the insulation tape.
So that the pins don't touch the metal on the outside here, when it goes in. So to make it look
better I'm going to try and cover it in something and I've decided to try some black hot glue.
I don't know if this is going to work. It's quite experimental. But we'll see, and we'll give it a
go. OK so the way I think I'm going to do this is i'm going to mask off parts of the Walkman.
OK I'm now going to put some hot glue on there.
OK I've got my glue gun. I've got some hot glue in there. Yeah I'll just start adding it.
I'm kind of happy with that so far. I'll just let that let that sit for a bit.
OK that looks pretty good. I'm gonna see if I can trim some of the excess.
Yeah let's maybe just trim a bit here as well.
OK well that'll do let's see what we've got.
It's a bit lumpy but uh I actually kind of like that.
OK with that all done I'll give it a quick listen make sure it still sounds good.
OK well that actually sounds pretty good. I can actually detect a little bit of wow and flutter.
But depending on the music you're playing, and the environment you're listening in, I reckon this
is going to sound pretty good. It's interesting how we've become so used to digital sound, that
hearing wow and flutter sounds a little bit odd. Sometimes though I do think, for a 30 year old
piece of technology, this is actually performing pretty well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to capture the output of this Walkman, so we can all have a listen and see what it sounds like.