here I go attempting to repair the cassette deck that I declared to be unrepairable in
case you didn't see my first video about this deck I found it at a thrift store for around
$15 and you may think that's a great deal because as the Technics which is regarded
to be a high quality brand of audio components it has auto reverse it supports chrome and
metal tapes and it has Dolby noise reduction and those are all desirable features on a
cassette deck
but the problem is it doesn't work at the very least it's going to need new pinch rollers
because the ones that were in it were completely disintegrating and it may also need new belts
because these decks are famous for the belts going bad and needing to be replaced
and as I later discovered these decks are also famous for the plastic gears in the mechanism
cracking and breaking and on this particular model I don't think there are any replacements
available for those gears some of the higher end Technics decks you can buy replacement
gear years for them but this one you can't so if those gears are cracked it's game over
for this deck
I was able to get a belt kit for it here you can see the set of four belts from WebSpareParts
this costs $22.82 I also got a set of pinch rollers for it it came in a set of five even
though it only needs four of them and these cost $17.79 so my total repair cost so far
is right around forty dollars for a deck that's worth about forty dollars in working condition
so that's why I declared it's not worth repairing these because even if your time is worth nothing
and you're just doing this for fun it just doesn't make financial sense to spend as much
to repair it as what it's worth especially since this is a very low end deck which lacks
important features such as manual recording level as you can see it only has automatic
recording level
since the belts on this deck are actually still intact I'm first going to try replacing
the pinch rollers and see if that is enough to get it working and if it is then I'll replace
the belts and luckily it is rather easy to replace the pinch rollers on this deck because
they just snap into place into the holders here so I'll take the new pinch roller
and snap it in I was able to fish these out without needing to remove the mechanisms from
the deck so hopefully I'll be able to fish these holders with the pinch rollers on them
back into place without needing to remove the mechanisms either
nope maybe if you have smaller fingers or better tools than me you'd be able to do it
in situ but I couldn't luckily I was able to remove the mechanism without needing to
remove the front panel of the deck so it wasn't too hard to get out and here I have my assembled
pinch rollers hopefully ready to just pop into place
like that you can see quite a bit of rust here and that's another reason why I declared
this deck to be unrepairable because if you open the door of a cassette deck and you see
rust it's best to just leave it and walk away but if this ends up working I'm going to put
some rust converter on that so at least it doesn't get any worse but for now just pop
in these pinch rollers and see if that's enough to get the mechanism working even without
replacing the belts
what the hell is wrong with it now?
if I turn it on after I just replaced those pinch rollers and the display is flashing
and I can hear the motor running in time with the flashes what did the power supply crap
out on me?
well it stopped flashing but that's not the complete display it's missing the counters
and everything and none of the controls do anything like it's supposed to be able to
open the door I don't want to close this one because then I wouldn't be able to open it
again now I can't even turn it off I'm pushing the power button and that's not turning it
off
I looked in the service manual and this deck does have a service mode which is indicated
by the level meter flashing but we had the entire display flashing not just the level
meter but I haven't even been able to go back to that because now whenever I plug it in
without even needing to press the power button it comes on and shows the level meter continuously
but nothing else shows up and none of the buttons do anything and you're supposed to
be able to exit out of the service mode by holding down the stop button for six seconds
but I tried that and it does not work so I don't think this is in service mode I think
it's just faulty
I think we just witnessed the death of this cassette deck because I believe what was happening
when the display was flashing was that something was overloading the power supply and causing
it to shut down and reset and as soon as it came back on it would overload again and shut
down again and the process repeated until eventually whatever that component that was
overloading the power supply shorted out entirely
and now as soon as I plug it in you can see only the level meter lights up and the right
side motor is running continuously which is not supposed to happen I know in some cassette
decks the motors do run continuously whenever it's turned on but this is not one of them
so this motor is running continuously this motor is not running at all and it's not responding
to any of the buttons
so I think the microprocessor in this is not running at all and the only reason this part
of the display is on because that's the only part of it that shows up all the time whenever
it's turned on so it doesn't need to be controlled by the microprocessor but everything else
like the counters and the symbols that show up when it's playing or rewinding or when
you turn on Dolby noise reduction those are controlled by the CPU in this and if the CPU
is not running you don't get those indications on the display and also it's not responding
to the power switch because that's also controlled through the main CPU so this thing is now
pretty much totally dead
and I think I found the culprit that diode sure looks burnt along with these other components
here so it's possible that the diode shorted to ground which caused the voltage regulator
to fail or maybe the voltage regulator shorted which caused the diode to blow open and the
thing is you can easily get these cascade failures where I could replace these two components
and they would just fail again because the actual problem is somewhere further down the
line and this is not the cause of it this is just a symptom of it
and these are the kinds of problems you can run into if these cassette decks from the
'90s where the circuitry is all highly integrated and computerized on older and simpler cassette
decks the problems you're going to run into are basically mechanical belts idlers motors
things like that but on these decks in addition to all those mechanical problems you can also
easily have electronic problems which makes them even more challenging to repair and even
more likely to not be worth repairing
at least I'm glad it broke on me before I went through all the trouble of unsoldering
the motor and removing this circuit board to gain access to replace the belts but I'm
going to tear this apart anyway just to see if it has those broken plastic gears that
everybody was talking about
as promised I did desolder the motor to gain access to the plastic fantastic mechanism
the original belts are still intact they're maybe not as supple as they used to be but
they're certainly not turning to goo yet and this is the wonderful plastic flywheel which
weighs barely anything and I think these two gears are the ones that people were talking
about cracking and chipping off teeth and if I rotate the spindle there I don't see
any missing teeth on that gear same thing with this one
so those gears seem to be okay so if this deck didn't die on me replacing the pinch
rollers probably would have been enough to get it working again but as people say these
are prone to cracking and breaking so they're a known failure point in addition to the belts
and pinch rollers
here's one of the motors which I am going to save because these are good quality Matsushita
or Matsushita or however you want to say it motors and this is actually quite a bit newer
than I expected because the date on it says the 8th of May 1999 and all the other documentation
I can see for this deck says it's from around 1996 so apparently they kept it in production
for a number of years so that's a good quality motor worth saving
so I just spend about forty dollars trying to repair a cassette deck that is worth about
forty dollars and all I got out of it are two good motors and a bunch of spare screws
but I will keep the belts and pinch rollers because I'm sure they'll come in handy for
repairing another deck in the future just not one of these
and I think it's important to document this failure because people like seeing old broken
items being restored made to work again so much so that there's an entire industry of
fake restoration videos where they take a working item and then they purposely destroy
it and then show the clips in reverse order to make it look like they're fixing it and
that may lead to unrealistic expectations of people trying to fix things like this and
not being successful and feeling like it's their fault they weren't able to fix it when
in reality the odds were probably stacked against them to begin with
and like I said in my first video in this series this is why I'm not as negative about
the new cassette equipment available today as many other cassette tape enthusiasts are
because any cassette player that works is better than one that doesn't
"Washington weather"
[Music]
"Mix 107.3"
and here is the Technics deck where it belongs in the E-waste drop-off bin so don't bother
asking me to send it to you because you think you can fix it but don't worry there's plenty
of other broken ones out there that you can take a shot at fixing
now don't get me wrong I don't mean to discourage people from repairing vintage cassette decks
but I do encourage you to choose one that is worth repairing or better yet keep swiping
left until you find one that does not need to be repaired such as this very nice JVC
deck from 1990 or this much simpler but still good sounding auto-reverse Realistic deck
from 1993 or this Panasonic boombox from 2001 with automatic opening cassette door and remote
control operation
[Music]